‘Flushed With Elation’: Ruth First at the University of Dar es Salaam

‘Flushed with elation’: Ruth First at the University of Dar es Salaam

Barbara Harlow
2009-10-22, Issue 454

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59662

Drawing on fascinating personal correspondence with a variety of individuals, Barbara Harlow looks back on the experiences of Ruth First during her short time as an economics lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam. First spent an autumn semester at the university in 1975, a time which coincided with the visits and debates of such prominent intellectuals as Walter Rodney, Mahmood Mamdani, Terence Ranger and Issa G. Shivji.

[Ruth First (1925-1982) was assassinated in Maputo by a letter-bomb sent from Pretoria to her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University. Her killers were granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But was Ruth a ‘legitimate target’, which in the commission’s parlance meant someone who was politically involved and therefore a target of the apartheid regime? Who was Ruth First?

Ruth First’s public and political career spanned more than three decades, from her contributions as an investigative reporter in South Africa in the late 1940s and 1950s, through her 117-day detention in 1963, to her exile years in the UK where she wrote and advocated on behalf of the anti-apartheid struggle and African liberation. Her last professional postings were as much academic as activist, at the University of Durham (UK), the University of Dar es Salaam, and in the Centre for African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University (Maputo).

The following article discusses her stay at the University of Dar es Salaam.] (Eds)

‘For the first three weeks I’ve been flushed with elation at the experience of development studies having relevance, and students being responsive.’
(Ruth First to Gavin Williams, 16 September 1975)

RUTH FIRST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM

Ruth First, on leave from the University of Durham (UK), spent the fall semester of 1975 teaching in the Department of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The early 1970s were intensely energetic years throughout recently decolonised Africa, and not least so in the universities. At Makerere University, for example, radically revised curricula in literary studies would lay the grounds for new imperatives and directions in African cultural production and critical practice.

At the University of Dar es Salaam, as at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), it was historiography – and by implication, history itself and its contribution to ‘nation-building’ – that was in question. Ruth First’s semester in Tanzania coincided with the presentations, seminars, debates and colloquia across the social sciences faculty of such intellectual upstarts – now luminaries, even posthumously – as Terence Ranger, Walter Rodney, Mahmood Mamdani, Archie Mafeje, John Saul, Jacques Depelchin and Issa G. Shivji.

But if 1975 was an especially active year in post-colonial African intellectual history, it was also another turning point in First’s own critical itinerary. South African historian and journalist and ANC (African National Congress) and SACP (South African Communist Party) activist, Ruth First had left her native country in 1964 with her three young daughters following her release after 117 days of detention to join her husband, Joe Slovo, in exile in London. She would never return to South Africa and was assassinated by a letter bomb sent from Pretoria in 1982 to her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique, where she had been a senior researcher at the Centre of African Studies since 1977. That final posting was one that First in fact visited on her return route to Durham from her semester in Dar es Salaam in December 1975–January 1976.

If less than half a year in a distinguished lifelong career as a writer and activist, Ruth First’s visiting semester at the University of Dar es Salaam is nonetheless crucial both to her own intellectual biography and to that story’s relevance for understanding the post-independence African historical narrative and its continued influence. The semester is also especially telling with regard to the early efforts toward post-colonial academic exchanges that sought, however haphazardly, as well as hazardously, to redress even then the distortions of divisions of intellectual labour (in Walter Rodney’s terms, perhaps, ‘how Europe underdeveloped Africa’) that have vexed programmes in international studies ever since.

Ruth First’s application did go forward, if in fits and starts, and she eventually arrived in Dar es Salaam in late August 1975 to take up her temporary teaching position at the university. This was some eight years after Nyerere’s pronouncement of the Arusha Declaration in February 1967 that outlined TANU’s (Tanganyika African National Union) policy on ’socialism and self-reliance’ for Tanzania.

First herself had been living in London since early 1964 where she had resettled, following her release from South African detention, raising her three daughters and managing the household during the often protracted absences of her husband, Joe Slovo, whose work with the ANC took him regularly to Africa. Her own already distinguished career in South Africa as an ANC/SACP anti-apartheid activist and investigative reporter was critically transformed over the course of her London expatriation, under both political and financial pressures. There was, in other words, a struggle to be waged and a family to be supported. Bills had to be paid after all, debts accounted for, old scores settled and freedom won.

Prior to taking up her post at the University of Durham in 1973 then, First had already published (or researched) numerous books, on South West Africa (1963), Libya (1974), coups in Africa (1970), sanctions against South Africa (1972), her own prison memoir, 117 Days (1965), and her credentials as a researcher were academically impeccable if politically, and probably just as predictably, controversial. She would go on to publish several more books, including Olive Schreiner (1980) and the posthumous Black Gold (1983). Whatever then could the former South African political detainee, journalist, professor, public speaker, rally crier and exile, possibly be doing in Dar es Salaam in 1975?

According to the Arusha Declaration, advocating as it did policies of socialism and self-reliance, and perhaps with particular and exemplary relevance for reconstituting academic endeavours and enterprise in the newly independent nation, the ‘biggest requirement (for development) is hard work’ but, the declaration admonishingly continues, ‘the second condition of development is the use of intelligence.’ ‘Unintelligent hard work,’ emphasised Nyerere’s declaration, ‘would not bring the same results as the two combined.’

Although Ruth was most certainly intelligent, and it would be difficult, even for her critics, to deny that she was a hard worker – on any number of fronts – there were still the requisite bureaucratic and political protocols attaching to the Durham–Dar exchange that needed to be worked out before the deal could be done. For example, as one Dar es Salaam colleague wrote to First regarding the possibility of establishing ’some sort of inter-departmental link’ between the two institutions, ‘the more good postgraduates you can send the better but they will have to learn Swahili’ (David Rosenberg to Ruth First, 08/06/74).

Nor was language facility the only issue. Shortly afterwards, First wrote back to Rosenberg regarding monetary, cost-benefit arrangements: ‘Since the suggestion for the inter-departmental links organised with the Inter-University Council, we are at present exploring the financial aspects of such an exchange, and the possibility that the Council might finance the secondment of teaching staff from here to your Department, so that you would not be burdened with any additional financial cost but, on the contrary, would benefit to the extent that you want additional teaching.’ (Ruth First to David Rosenberg, 26/08/74). But there were political investments as well that would be at stake. Rosenberg wrote, for example, that ‘we are extremely keen on bringing here people who have worked on Cuba, China, West Africa, etc etc’ (24/10/74).

Two months later, as the prospects for the exchange evolved, First herself would reply to Dr Rweyememu regarding both her intellectual interests and her academic bonafides, that, as she wrote, ‘my strongest concerns and interests are in Africa, both independent Africa and the South, though I have been teaching across a broadly comparative Third World board’ (28/12/74). Her teaching and research interests, and her political commitments too, would seem to have qualified Ruth First for the opportunity to join for a semester the faculty in the Department of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam, even if, as her head of department in Durham, Philip Abrams, wrote to her in June 1975, ‘I suppose the invitation is a Good Thing, although I must say it will cause some problems. I will start now,’ Abrams nonetheless went on, ‘to unravel the administrative tangles if any.’ After all, since ‘we want,’ he wrote, ‘a special relationship with Tanzania I suppose we really should take the opportunity to bring it to life if we can’ (06/01/75). Within a matter of months, Ruth would be in Dar es Salaam, where Arusha-provoked crises still simmered on the campus – and intellectual excitement continued to ferment.

EPISTOLARY ASSESSMENTS

In one of her first epistolary communications from Dar es Salaam, this one to her husband Joe, Ruth suggested both the exhilaration and the frustration that came with the new posting and its inevitable prevarications. ‘Today,’ she wrote, ‘after 24 hours of searching for him, Professor Guruli [then chair of the Economics Department], who got me out here, dropped his entire course in my lap, and I start Monday.’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 15/08/75). That lament was perhaps enhanced by an apparently uncomfortable BAA flight and seemingly unsatisfactory accommodation at a (albeit luxury) hotel too far from the campus.

Transportation to ‘the hill’ (both physical and occasionally ideological) would be a persistent problem, but in any case, the ‘University is pretty confusing, come to think of it’, the visiting lecturer wrote home, giving as one example, the vexing political assessment of two of her new colleagues. She’d been, as she noted, ‘… talking to Mamdani (whose work is the Shivji equivalent on Uganda…), but he [Shivji] must label Mamdani a Trot. Like many labels, they stick to the wrong surface.’ In the same letter, the self-conscious epistolary expatriate described as well a disturbing ’slaughter at a seminar’, the occasion being ‘when Terence Ranger – founder of the so-called Dar es Salaam school of history – was put on the chopping block. I must say he deserved it, for a woolly ambiguous treatment of so called peasant consciousness though the attack was ferocious. Apparently the calculated murder-in-public of liberal ideology is part of class struggle, but even my stony heart was moved by Ranger’s plight’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 15/08/75). Heady stuff for sure, even for ’stony hearts’ like that of Ruth First who, for all her accomplishments, was already known both for her diffidence in venturing into new areas of inquiry and for her refusal ‘to suffer fools gladly’.

Ruth First’s letters from Dar es Salaam provide thus both a provocative, dramatically punctuated and scrupulously scriptorial account of the academic activities on ‘the hill’ and an analysis of the challenges of academic exchanges generally, but particularly when complicated by the combined and uneven syllabic form and content of courses in ‘development’. Even the very letter-writing itself was something of a hurdle for Ruth, inveterate and notorious typist that she was. As she wrote to her daughter Gillian, for example: ‘Am typing this in office hours on an Italian portable; the structure of Italian is apparently different, so the m z w ? . ! ó o and heavens knozs what else are all in the zrong positions. You’ll have to decipher as you go; it’s not intended to be coded’ (Ruth First to Gillian Slovo, 20/10/75).

At least she had a typewriter though, even if with an Italian keyboard (but then Ruth had always been enamoured of most things Italian – shoes, leather, and former colonies too – from Libya to Eritrea). Still and all, general working conditions in the Economics Department did pose some frustrations for the relocated researcher, teacher and epistolarian, as she wrote to Joe after a month in Dar: ‘Had been running out of paper till today (the econs dept has nought: I ordered 2 lead pencils, 2 file covers and some paper and gem clips and the list came back with crosses against all items) when a friend showed me round the White elephant of a fishery institute next door this hotel. It’s Dutch money and expertise all down the drain. The huge freezers are empty; the building deserted; rather like an antonioni film. But the cupboards are full of stationery so I’m in stock again’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 18/09/75).

The letters, like the luta, continued and so, another month and a half later, Ruth wrote again to Joe regarding the epistolary episteme: ‘If you want to know how I manage so many letters, they’re generally easier than lecture or seminar preparation, and when I’m apprehensive about starting a new lecture, I warm up on letters, on the grounds that friends and relatives are less hostile than students. Not that the latter are, rather they’re demanding. In fact, I’m getting a lot of good feedback from them and will be really sorry to be back among my English lumps [in Durham].’ Ruth, that is, was learning too, as well as teaching, at least according to the version in the same letter: ‘My course hit a few good high spots – and some low – but they’re hipped on the analysis of under-development, and it’s really intriguing how they react when they have to apply their method to Tanzania. This when the divide comes. The radicals persevere with the analysis; the nationalists take refuge in statements about exceptions. Or something even less tangible…’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 1/11/75).

Teacher–student relations, however, were not Ruth’s only concern. There were collegial (and then again sometimes not so collegial) interactions that preyed on her efforts, both pedagogical and political, to participate in the educational processes in that African university, representing a continental space from whose liberationist transformations she had been exiled for more than a decade now. In the same letter to Joe, then, she wrote further, perhaps by way of attempted reassurance to both herself and her spouse: ‘In case you’re worried, my relations with the people that matter remain very good. I’ve not quarrelled, only argued! Of course I’ve been blackballed by that silly crowd at the university which clusters like a cabal round the GDR staff and trainees’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 01/11/75). Already in September, she had written to Joe that ‘S…’ and his lot are beginning to character-assassinate me. Mildly, but they’re testing, I suppose. Tried it out with a chap connected with IDS with whom I’m friendly. Asked him if he knew I was using a British passport. They’re actually beneath contempt. Not that this item is that significant or important but it’s a measure of their tactics. They should stick,’ Ruth blandishes nonetheless, ‘to the non-capitalist road’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 18/09/75).

Dar es Salaam, the university (’the hill’), the economics department and the hotel too were vital crossroads to, fro and within Africa at the time, however, and so Ruth First, however trepidatious, however venturesome, found herself from the very first in the thick of things, looking out on various sides and from across sundry fronts: ‘The place is flooded with expatriates and new ones are coming every day. As are the consultants and experts […] There’s also top FAO man here, who once worked with John Saul and co and knows everything there is to know, it is said. He is appalled that this luxury hotel is still running. When tourism was part of planning, there was an outcry against the wastage of resources, but this was excused on the grounds that tourists would bring foreign currency…’ Even so, Ruth goes on, ‘there is, as usual, a great deal of new work being done, especially on the rural areas’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 21/08/75). And she had, after all, been seconded to teach courses in the ‘political economy of underdevelopment and planning’ and ‘African society and environment.’

CURRICULAR ASSIGNMENTS

For all the ‘new work being done’, there was, even for Ruth, much work to do, and she was especially concerned – at times even ‘panicked’ – about her courses and lectures. Just over a week or so into her stay in Dar es Salaam, she wrote to Joe in serious jest, ‘Can you believe that I’ve not had a swim yet? Partly, mostly, because,’ she confessed, ‘I fell on such a pile of daily preparational living from lecture to lecture’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 21/08/75). It wasn’t the first moment of panic, however, since a few days earlier she had already found anxious camaraderie with an Italian colleague: ‘… sunbathed [note, not swimming] for an hour or so but am panicked about my lecture tomorrow so worked mostly, in between talking to the Italian whose lecture tomorrow is panicking him too. What a dreary routine this academic life…’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 15/8/75 – postscript Sunday night).

The ‘panic’ notwithstanding, First was, in the early days of her semester-long sojourn at least, especially impressed with the ‘Africanisation’ of the university and the programmatic priority, the crises notwithstanding, given to the matriculation of ‘mature’ students. As she wrote reflectively and speculatively to her husband Joe shortly after her arrival, on 3 September, ‘I’m amazed at the level of my students, though I’m sure there are duds and conservatives among them too. But this is the first year of the mature intake i.e. university entrants are no longer processed through the schools but through the workplaces, and need Tanu credentials. From the looks of it numbers of older people, experienced people have got in, and their commitment is very earnest, even if only for careers.’

Parenthetically, however, she continues: ‘(One negative effect is that the intake of women dropped from 10 to 2.5 per cent; a reflection of the discrimination against women in life after high school.).’ (Ruth First to Joe Slovo, 03/09/75). A short month and a half later, however, the same teacher of the second half of the year-long ‘Economics 202: Political Economy of Underdevelopment and Planning’ would write, if not less enthusiastically then still rather more critically, to her daughter Gillian:

‘My students are complaining that in the essay assignments I’ve set them – as 40 per cent of the exam mark – they have to read more than one book. More explicitly they are open-ended questions: they complain, they have to think out an answer: and a direction of argument: Surely some will take to it well: many are very bright, though instinctively set for conservatism once this university training guarantees them a meal ticket for life. Which it will.

‘What gets me is when, in conversation or in class, some of them try putting over this socialist ethos thing: an official line that carries less and less conviction as they proceed to pretend bureaucrats and workers and peasants alike have their shoulder to the socialist wheel.

‘The workers’ term for the bureaucrats is the Nizers: those who have never looked back since they were Africanised into the controlling posts of the system.’ (20/10/75)

The course assignments for Econ 202’s second term, as identified on the syllabus, were, however, indeed demanding and organised under the topics of ‘theories of underdevelopment’, ’strategies of development’, ‘industrialisation’, ‘rural questions’, ‘rural co-operation in Tanzania’ and ‘class and development’, with readings ranging from the classical works of Marx and Lenin through contemporary critics such as A.G. Frank, Samir Amin, E. Laclau, H. Alavi, and Issa G. Shivji, to cite but a few examples.

First herself was not unconcerned at the kinds of academic exchanges that were enabled – or disabled – by her own relative newness to the situation and the challenges of the experiment in higher education launched in the early years of the University of Dar es Salaam and into which she had entered. Her lecture notes for the introductory session are provocatively suggestive of the pedagogical imperative she worked under in this historic setting:

‘Today an introd lecture by way of exploration

‘Find my feet, find out where yours are, for we have to run this course together!

‘Difficulties of not being with you right from outset

‘unavoidable

‘My purpose today: to check where you are at.’

The notes go on:

‘MAIN purpose: to draw some threads together

‘Provide an overview which does not repeat the theories of development, underdevelopment, but which slots them together, for they do make a pattern.’

First also admonished and encouraged her students about the ‘importance of feedback’, noting to her students:

‘Hope you’ll speak up, even dissatisfaction, complaints. Lectures pack too much? too thin? Coming over too fast? […] Interruptions (questions) during lectures? You must judge. Break continuity – danger. throw me off my balance? On the other hand sometimes helpful to ask for clarification. And if I can’t give it at the time I promise to go away and think about it for the following time.’

As for the seminars, these are to be ‘working sessions’, she emphasises to the students, ‘YOU to do the work.’ For that first introductory lecture, the teacher’s notes run to 15 typewritten, handwritten, much redacted pages. Ruth First was, as she wrote at the time to her Durham colleague and friend Gavin Williams, ‘flushed with elation at the experience of development having relevance’ (16/09/75).

FINALS

The final exam questions that First set, following meticulous revisions and painstakingly cramped rewritings, for the students of Econ 202, not only ask the exam-takers to respond to the concerns of the syllabi, but also perhaps to summon a critical analysis, even if not an elated one, of the ‘experience of development having relevance’:

‘Answer Three (3) Questions, 1 (one) from Section A and two (2) from Section B.

Section A

1. Outline and evaluate ‘vicious circle’ explanations for poor economies.
2. Outline and evaluate Rostow’s Stages of Growth theory.
3. Distinguish between ‘growth’ and ‘development’.
4. What factors explain the expansionist tendencies of capitalism (a) in the period of the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century and (b) in the post-independence situation of the second half of the 20th century?

Section B

5. ‘For capitalism to penetrate into the sphere of industrial production it must have a market which is ready to absorb a continuously increasing volume of products’. What obstructs this process in under-developed economies?
6. Explain Samir Amin’s theoretical model for self-centred (developed) and dependent (peripheral) capital accumulation.
7. ‘In under-developed economies the state performs the function of merchant capital’. How would you substantiate this statement from the characteristics of merchant capital?
8. ‘Industrialisation can deepen under-development’. Demonstrate this with reference to the case of Tanzania, giving careful and accurate instances of the trends in industrialization policy since Independence.
9. ‘External dominance is only possible where it finds support in national sectors which benefit from it’. Is this statement valid in the case of Tanzania OR Kenya?’

The questions that Ruth First posed to her Econ 202 students at the end of the 1975 academic year, and at the conclusion of her own semester-long academic exchange at the University of Dar es Salaam, were indeed pressing questions, not only for her students, who needed to pass at least the exam if not the hurdles awaiting them in the public sphere, but for the researchers, colleagues, policy-makers and politicians, Tanzanian, African and international alike, with whom she shared and disputed the intellectual premises and academic corridors and offices. The same questions, that is, animated importantly the discussions among the ‘intellectuals on the hill’, as Issa G. Shivji referred to his colleagues on the campus, or critics – both positive and negative – still identified in the literature as the groundbreaking ‘Dar es Salaam school of historiography’.

For now, however, which Econ 202 exam question(s) would you want to try to answer? Then? Currently? Or which of the interrogatory puzzles might Ruth First herself have been most keen to investigate at the time? Would Question Four, for example, among the options under Section A, be considered as timely, anachronistic, or even, just perhaps, prescient, asking as it does after a longer historical narrative that would connect critically the ‘expansionist tendencies of capitalism (a) in the period of the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century and (b) in the post-independence situation of the second half of the 20th century.’ Beginnings and ends, not to mention means, were implied in the exam question. In other words, why was Ruth First, so ‘flushed with elation at the experience of development having relevance’, asking her Econ 202 students about colonialism on their final exam, to comment on the ’scramble for Africa’ of all things?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in the maiden issue of Chemchemi, bulletin of the Mwalimu Nyerere Professorial Chair in Pan-African Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the editorial board of Chemchemi.
* ‘Looked Class, Talked Red: Ruth First, An Intellectual Biography’ by Barbara Harlow is a forthcoming publication from Pluto Press and Pambazuka Press.
* Barbara Harlow is a professor of English literature at the University of Texas.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Ending Aid Dependence: Asserting National Autonomy

Ending aid dependence: Asserting national autonomy

Yash Tandon interviewed by Pambazuka News
2009-10-22, Issue 454

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59664

In an interview with Pambazuka News, Yash Tandon discusses the problems of ‘development aid’, his differences with Dambisa Moyo’s arguments in ‘Dead Aid’, the importance of Southern countries’ right to autonomy and his own book, ‘Ending Aid Dependence’.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Yash, how did you come to write ‘Ending Aid Dependence?’

YASH TANDON: The book was written just before the September 2008 conference in Accra organised by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank on the Accra Action Agenda (AAA). The AAA was based on the OECD’s Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE). The PDAE, based on five principles, looked benign at first sight … until you began to analyse it in detail, looked at the fine print, and began to understand its implications. It was clear to me that hiding behind its benevolent exterior lay an insidious formula to subject aid-recipient poor countries to the collective discipline of the donors. Like colonialism that was sold to us as something ‘for our own good’ and in recent decades the ideology of globalisation and neoliberalism, the PDAE was packaged also as something ‘good’ for us, especially for Africa. As somebody said, I think it was Aristotle, there comes a time when out of a false good there arises a true evil. This is what the AAA was. So the aim of the book was to caution the developing countries against endorsing the AAA.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What were the biggest challenges in writing it?

YASH TANDON: The main challenge was twofold. The first was to meet the deadline of September 2008. I started writing the book in June 2008, and I was immensely relieved that I was able to finish and get it published just before the conference. The second challenge was to get the message across to the developing countries. The OECD and the World Bank could not be stopped, I am afraid, but I am pleased to say that once my book was in the hands of the delegates coming from the developing countries, many of them did begin to put to question the whole idea of ‘development aid’ as a genuine instrument of development.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: The aid taxonomy that you have come up with is a useful tool with which to analyse aid and place it into categories. As you stated: ‘Aid can be placed in a continuum from left to right, starting with Purple Aid (based on the provision of global public goods), Yellow Aid (based on the principle of geopolitical strategic and security interests), Orange Aid (based on the commercial principle), and Red Aid (based on an ideological principle).’ How did you come up with these categories? Did the colour-coded work of the World Trade Organization (WTO) inspire you?

YASH TANDON: Actually not, there is very little inspiring about the WTO. Multilateral trade is important, of course, but the WTO is so deeply steeped in legitimising the outcome of asymmetrical power relations between the North and the South that it is the wrong instrument to advance the cause of multilateralism. No, I invented the colours myself. It wasn’t difficult. And the main purpose behind it was to disaggregate the phenomenon of ‘development aid’. Too much is made of the fact that some countries have met their 0.07 per cent of GNP quota for aid to the poor countries and others have not. It is when you deconstruct the aid package that you realise that these figures are quite meaningless, and often used for propaganda purposes. There is much hidden in the package that is counter-developmental; indeed, if I may say, imperialist.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: But, surely, you cannot use the term ‘imperialist’ in describing the legitimate concern of countries in the North about, for example, the violation of human rights or corrupt governments in developing countries. If they use aid to make countries in the South respect human rights and be responsible to their people, what is wrong with that?

YASH TANDON: This is a complex question that needs much time to explain. I am aware that a number of our friends in the North, especially in the civil society, are disturbed about the conclusions I derive in relation to what I call ‘Red Aid’, which is in fact the most dangerous form of aid. I include the donors’ use of the aid instrument to enforce human rights and ‘good governance’ on our countries as the most intrusive, and indeed, imperialist, form of aid. Of course, we cannot endorse the violation of human rights, nor can we condone corrupt governments. But donors have often used ‘human rights’ as a cover to push money into many of our own civil society organisations in the South to advance their own agenda in our countries. And let’s not forget that the Western nations have double standards on human rights. They are also selective about what instances of violations of these rights constitute legitimate for their intervention and which are not. The human rights issue is a minefield. And so is the issue of ‘good governance’. Donors are best advised to keep out of using their monetary clout to enforce human rights or good governance on our countries. But as I said, this is a complex question. I suggest you read the parts in my book in which I have discussed this issue.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: In light of the current financial crisis, and your advocacy for more South–South cooperation mainly in respect to aid, do you believe that the financial crisis facilitates and brings the wanted cooperation forward? Or does the impact of the crisis inhibit it?

YASH TANDON: It is interesting that the impact of the current financial crisis is directly proportional to the degree of the South’s integration into the North’s globalisation agenda – the deeper the integration, the bigger the negative impact. This does not mean that we abruptly cut off from the North, but it does reinforce the point I made in my book about the imperative of the ‘national project’ as opposed to the globalisation project. Would the present crisis help or hinder South–South cooperation? Well, it is going to be a struggle. There are some in our own countries in the South who argue that we in the South need ‘more aid’ to get out of the crisis. I disagree. I think we need more national and regional ‘self-reliance’ on matters such as regional market creation, regional currency etc. The initiative taken by some Latin American countries joined by a few countries from the Caribbean to create the regional currency – the Unified System for Regional Compensation (SUCRE) – for example, is a step in the right direction. But as I said, this is going to be a struggle. I hope Pambazuka News will open space to debate this matter further.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: As you have pointed out in your most recent article in Pambazuka News, ‘G8 and Africa: Some give, plenty take’, nothing has changed in donor countries’ policies towards developing countries. Do you believe that the ‘national project’ (in essence, the continuation of the struggle for independence) has died in developing countries? Or conversely, have been there any events that point to a revival in the recent year?

YASH TANDON: Things are indeed changing. There are tell-tale signs that the Western world is on the defensive. It is losing its dominant and domineering position in the South. It is losing moral authority. Its global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the WTO and the OECD are losing legitimacy and credibility. The countries of the South, on the other hand, are beginning to reassert their national independence. Of course, it will take a long time before they gain total liberation from the economic domination of the West.

This is true even of countries as large as China, India and Brazil, where Western multinational corporations are able to use their lead in technology and intellectual property rights to penetrate production, distribution and financial systems. But the shifting balance of forces between the North and the South in favour of the South is a palpable and unstoppable force.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: While the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is resilient, as you point out, last meeting in 2008, do you see it as a potential leader for the expansion of ‘policy space’ (the expansion of space to operate independently without restrictions from dominant global power-holders)? Where do you see the G77 and emerging powers like China in all of this?

YASH TANDON: NAM is a historical movement. There was a time after the end of the Cold War when its future was put in doubt, mostly by Western observers. But that was a myopic view of the movement. NAM was more than simply keeping out of the Cold War, it was also an assertion by the former colonised peoples that they wanted to be masters of their own self-propelled development. NAM also adopted certain principles regulating relations between states that were being systematically violated by the counties of the North – such as the five principles of non-interference in internal affairs, equality, national sovereignty, cultural diversity and identity.

I am pleased that the NAM countries were at least able to have the above principles enshrined in the final document at the Accra meeting on the PDAE, which my book discusses. The Accra document did not say if these principles also applied to North–South relations. So, yes, NAM continues to remain a live expression of the commitment to an independent policy space for the South. Emerging countries such as China and India, and the G77 countries in general, can no longer be taken for granted. Gone are the days of 1945 when the institutions of global economic and political governance were engineered without their effective participation. Gone also are the days when the WTO was thrust onto the peoples of the South without their effective participation. It is a different world now.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: There has been much publicity given to Dambisa Moyo’s book ‘Dead Aid’. Her argument boils down to critiquing aid as a fetter against private accumulation, in essence a re-casting of the tired neoliberal mantra about the free market. That position has been in strong contrast to your own, yet some would say you have been surprisingly silent in critiquing her position. Why?

YASH TANDON: This is a very good question. No, I am not shy of critiquing Dambisa Moyo’s prescription for development. I recognise that this will take Africa backwards.

I have avoided confronting Moyo so far because I want to join forces with her to argue the case against development aid. I agree with Moyo that ‘development aid’ is no solution to our under-development. I agree with her that aid makes our governments accountable to donors rather than to our own people. And so on. At times, she makes an even stronger and more categorical case against aid than I do.

However, her proposed solution of opening up the African market and resources to foreign investment capital is not the way forward for Africa, or for the developing countries. To be sure, we in the South are still behind the West in terms of technology, and we do need technology. But the barrier to this technology is not capital inflow from the North. In fact, there is more capital outflow from the South to the North. The barrier to the South acquiring technology lies in intellectual property rights (IPRs) in which technology is encased. I used to be the executive director of the South Centre from 2005 to 2009. One of the major battles the centre (founded among others by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere) was to break down this stranglehold of IPRs on the universalisation of technology. Science and technology are a heritage of mankind, not a gift of the West to civilisation.

Moyo comes from a different world from where I come from. She comes from the world of finance, and it is not surprising that she should offer solutions closer to her experience. I come from the world of academia and active political struggle for the liberation of my country from the shackles of imperialism, a phenomenon which Moyo does not recognise. Lately, I have been involved in building the capacity of the countries of the South to negotiate in the WTO, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD. From my experience I can say that the track Moyo is advocating is already losing effectiveness, credibility and legitimacy. She is right about ‘Dead Aid’ – the title of her book – but what she is advocating is a ‘Dead Road’.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: As the former executive director of the South Centre, what are your thoughts on the recent Africa–South America (ASA) summit in Venezuela? Should we see this as a major event in South–South cooperation or as a stepping-stone to future cooperation?

YASH TANDON: What we are witnessing is a milestone in the road to South-South cooperation. Western mainstream media has been attacking President [Hugo] Chavez even though he has been repeatedly winning democratic elections. Hence the ASA summit has been maligned in the press. But we must remain clear in our mind as to what the ASA stands for. It stands for the South’s further liberation from the domination of the North. One of the most important things to have come out of the summit is the endorsement of the Banco del Sur (the Bank of the South) as an alternative financial system to the IMF–World Bank dominated global banking system. Of course, the Banco has to go a long way; its capital base is still small, and it is still evolving rules of financing development projects. But it has a bright future. It is interesting that several African countries have expressed an interest in joining the bank.

Another significant development is the evolving alternative currency in the southern hemisphere. The SUCRE can offer to the countries of the Latin America a real opportunity to break away out of the dominance of the dollar. He who controls money controls the economy. That has been our experience in Africa, where the IMF effectively controls our money. Money is a public good. It is not something that should be handed over to private banking. The Latin American experience may yet usher in a new concept of money, one that serves the people and not a few thousand from the corrupt elites of the banking establishment.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Do you have any future projects with the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI)? Are there any publications on the horizon for us to read?

YASH TANDON: SEATINI, whose chairman I am, is an evolving civil society organisation. It is right now focused on the current negotiations in the WTO, and also the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) being negotiated between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries and the European Union. We are fighting against the EPAs. It is also involved in issues related to food security, land-grabbing in Africa, climate change and regional integration. I am myself engaged in applying my ideas on ending aid dependency to my own country, Uganda. I am taking this opportunity to revisit the history of our monetary policy, and to examining how and why we allowed ourselves to be chained down by aid and an externally controlled money system, and how we might break away from it. I am also doing some research and writing on African integration and regionalism. This is under threat from the EPAs, and continued fixation of our leaders to the flawed neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions. This is strange, since these organisations are themselves now bankrupt not only of capital but also of ideas. Out of these engagements, no doubt, will emerge some small publications that I hope will have useful policy recommendations to our governments. Through these writings I hope also to join the larger debate on how the African people can unite against ceaseless efforts by imperial forces to divide and conquer us.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Yash Tandon is the former executive director of the South Centre in Geneva.
* Tandon’s ‘Ending Aid Dependence’ is available from Pambazuka Press at £9.95.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Lenin Was Right on the Role of the Banks in the Economic Crisis

Lenin had it right: Role of the banks in the economic crisis

By Fred Goldstein
Oct 24, 2009 12:03 AM

When the workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago seized the factory last winter, their heroism in defying both their boss and the Bank of America electrified workers and progressive people all over the country and even around the world.

When they walked out of the factory in victory—with their demands for severance pay, wages and other benefits agreed to by BOA—they had accomplished what seemed impossible. Some 250 or more workers, mostly immigrants, had forced a giant financial behemoth, which controls hundreds of billions of dollars through its banking empire, to back up and meet their demands.

Revealed in that struggle was an important relationship that all class-conscious workers should take to heart. The capitalist boss of Republic Windows and Doors, the exploiter of the workers in his factory, was just a dependent of his giant creditor.

He needed the money from Bank of America to continue to carry out the exploitation of the workers. The boss lived off the profits sweated out of the labor of the workers. But without the money to keep going, he was unable to continue the cycle of exploitation. Thus, the workers were out of a job.

In a microcosm, that struggle revealed a basic truth. It is a class relationship that is concealed for the most part.

In capitalist society, exploitation and all economic activity begin with money. This explains the power of the banks. In order to live in the profit system, workers must sell their labor power. In order to thrive in the profit system, the boss must buy that labor power and the means of production. But that takes money.

Because of the special circumstances of their struggle, the small contingent of workers at Republic Windows and Doors was actually in combat with the real economic rulers of capitalist society.

Lenin on the special role of the banks

The dominance of the bankers was dramatically revealed on a larger scale when the financial crisis first broke out in September 2008 after the failure of Lehman Brothers. Bailout money poured into the coffers of the banks in return for the government taking shares in them. There was talk about the “nationalization” of the banks—a government takeover.

When the smoke cleared, there had been no government takeover of the banks. What really emerged was that the biggest, most powerful banks had made great inroads in taking over the financial reins of the government.

This is a confirmation of the Marxist analysis of imperialist society which V.I. Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik revolution, elaborated in his book “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” written in 1916 during World War I.

Lenin described the evolution of capitalism from its competitive stage in the 19th century to its monopoly stage in the 20th century. He showed how the means of production grew to gigantic proportions and how the imperialist powers divided up the globe among themselves into colonies and spheres of influence. He described the growth of giant monopolistic corporate cartels and syndicates that dominated the resources and markets of the globe. He pointed to the growing export of capital abroad and the super-exploitation of the colonial peoples.

Looking at the power behind it all, he singled out the role of the banks and how they came to dominate industry and created finance capital. In a famous section entitled “The Banks and Their New Role,” he wrote:

“The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as middlemen in the making of payments. In so doing they transform inactive money capital into active, that is, into capital yielding a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class.

“As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism.” (Lenin’s works can be found on http://www.marxists.org).

Later in the same work, Lenin described the parasitic nature of the financiers, which is so prominent in the present crisis:

“It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy.”

Much has been written of late about the so-called “financialization of capital,” as if it were a new discovery. The wealth of the banks and the magnitude of their speculation have grown immensely with the growth of capitalist imperialism. But Lenin described its evolution and fundamental features almost a century ago. Wall Street’s insatiable lust for profit cannot be treated in isolation from the analysis of imperialism as a form of society.

Lenin showed that the dominance of finance capital is an inevitable and irreversible stage of the capitalist system. Competitive capitalism grows into monopoly capitalism—the stage in which finance capital and the financial oligarchy have risen to the pinnacle of the system of exploitation and wage slavery, at home and abroad.

Banks suck profits from everywhere

The banks are tied to big oil, big industry, the insurance companies, all the hedge funds, the private equity funds, the mortgage brokers, the stock exchange and every other institution in society that thrives off the stolen labor of the workers.

The banks profit from every war and every intervention because wars are economic enterprises that take financing and involve fees and interest. The banks get profit from the government, which borrows from them at high interest rates to pay for wars. They also get profit from the military-industrial complex itself, which they finance. Plus they profit from the spoils when the Pentagon conquers territory.

The banks profit from every layoff, every plant closing, every speed-up, because every business, large and small, is in debt to the banks and pays interest out of the surplus value it has wrung from the workers.

They profit from the debt of the workers. After workers are exploited on the job, their wages are converted into profit for the banks in the form of fees and exorbitant interest payments. Banks will make loans to corporations to break strikes but will deny loans to companies to pay workers’ benefits, as in the Republic Windows and Doors case.

Banks profit from the high cost of education, both from the interest they get from student loans and the fees from college and university trust funds that they manage. They profit from the health care crisis because they are completely intertwined with the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical-industrial complex.

And they make money from racism, which brings extra profits because of the lower wages paid to Black, Latino/a, Asian, Middle Eastern and Native peoples and because divisions within the working class keep all wages down and profits up.

The banks profit from sexism because women get paid less than men, to say nothing of women’s unpaid labor in the home—which, among other things, provides the next generation of workers for the bosses free of charge.

They profit from lesbian, gay, bi and trans oppression, not only because it is divisive but because LGBT people are deprived of countless economic and social benefits available to straight people—benefits that would have to come out of the coffers of the government or the bosses.

There is no aspect of capitalist society in the imperialist epoch that is untouched by the bankers.

Banks get rich while workers sink

So it should be no surprise that Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and other lackeys of the bankers—who are high-paid government officials but are lackeys nevertheless—scurry about trying to save their masters while the entire ship of the working class is sinking.

When the government orchestrated the bankruptcy of General Motors, tens of thousands of workers’ jobs were destroyed through plant closings. But the biggest banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Credit Suisse, all of whom were getting money from the government—made sure that the bankruptcy settlement guaranteed them every penny of the $6 billion in loans they were owed. Other syndicates of bondholders also got paid off.

When the financial meltdown came in the fall of 2008 and the banks were in trouble, within days they had Henry Paulson write a three-page piece of legislation granting them $750 billion. Paulson, a former co-chair of Goldman Sachs and secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, made sure the legislation specified that neither Congress nor the courts could review or alter this colossal grant.

When Congress rebelled and voted down this outrageous giveaway over fear of mass anger, the bankers simply turned up the heat and got the vote reversed over the space of a weekend.

After a struggle among the banks, a small number of them emerged stronger than before the crisis. Banks that were bailed out because they were “too big to fail” have gotten bigger, richer and financially and politically more powerful.

What was revealed in microcosm in the Republic Windows and Doors strike is now being revealed on a society-wide scale. Financial vultures are using their power to swallow up more and more of the wealth of society while the working class is plunged into economic and social disaster.

Goldman Sachs announced that it made a record $3.1 billion in profits in the last quarter. It is scheduled to fork out $5.3 billion in bonuses to its team of bankers. (New York Times, Oct. 16) JPMorgan Chase had third-quarter profits of $3.6 billion, seven times higher than a year ago. (AFP, Oct. 14)

Meanwhile, home foreclosures went up 23 percent in the month of September. Workers are living out of their cars and being pushed into homeless shelters.

This is the perfect capitalist symmetry of wealth and exploitation. Bankers get rich while the masses are plunged deeper into crisis. The stock market goes up to 10,000 while unemployment edges up to 10 percent. (Real unemployment is nearer 18 percent.)

The latest numbers on the government stimulus plan reveal that $16 billion has been spent to create 30,000 jobs—a paltry result. About 8 million jobs have been lost and the number is climbing. But the bankers’ stimulus plan has yielded billions in profits and stock market riches.

Workers’ rebellion inevitable

This situation can only be temporary. It is all based on the fact that the workers have not yet begun to fight back on a wide scale. The relationship of class forces is temporarily on the side of the bankers and the bosses.

They are pushing everyone around now, including the Obama administration, which has catered to them. The banks have spent $220 million lobbying against even a minimal financial reform bill designed to restrain them from wild speculation and gambling—which touched off the present crisis in the first place.

The banks are the central nervous system and the organizers of capitalist imperialism. They dominate capitalist politics. Their representatives are always high up in every administration, Republican or Democrat. They break through every attempt to hold them back from plundering the workers because, as Lenin said, they gather all the financial resources of society into their hands. Money capital is the beginning point of the exploitation of labor, because capitalist industry must have funds. But the banks also use this financial power to promote speculation, gambling and financial extortion.

They think that they can go on like this forever. But they will soon see that there is a force mightier than capital, mightier than bankers. It is the force of tens of millions of workers and oppressed people, who will get to the point where they can’t take it any more. All the capitalists’ money will not be able to stop the class struggle and a class war against capitalism itself.

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Peacekeepers help celebrate UN Day on the Organization's 64th birthday

Peacekeepers deployed in operations around the world today joined in celebrations marking United Nations Day on the world body's 64th birthday.

Senior UN official deplores latest kidnapping of aid worker in Darfur

The top United Nations humanitarian official in Sudan today condemned the kidnapping of a staff member of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the latest in a series of aid worker abductions in the country's war-scarred region of Darfur.

Carbon dioxide: we’re already over the safe limit

Concentrations passed the limit in 1987, says Geoffrey Lean.

By Geoffrey LeanPublished: 6:58PM BST 23 Oct 2009
Something else unprecedented is happening today, and again it has to do with climate change. It marks the first worldwide campaign for a data point, one that has spread randomly and virally – particularly among the young – through internet and mobile phone networks.
More than 4,200 events and rallies are to take place in 170 countries, including 1,500 across the US, 300 in China and 240 in Britain. It’s named after a number, 350 – for the 350 parts per million increasingly being seen as the safe limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Last month, a batch of the world’s leading climate scientists, writing in Nature, concluded that it should not be exceeded.

There’s rather a big snag, however. We are already well over that limit, at 387 ppm. Concentrations passed the 350 point in 1987, and international negotiations are bogged down over plans that would eventually stabilise them at 450ppm. So the world would not only have to cut emissions back far faster than anyone has thought possible, but would actually have to develop ways of taking the gas out of the atmosphere – the biggest ask in history.
The campaign is undaunted. “We know better than anybody exactly how difficult this is and how politically unrealistic it is at the moment,” says author Bill McKibben, its founder.” Our job is to change the political reality, because the physical and chemical reality is not going to change.”

Hope of cleaner skies as Beijing residents switch from coal to electricity

Jane Macartney in Beijing

The brick walls are grey, the sky is leaden, the alley is choked with dust and rubble as workmen fill in a long channel running along Tanggong Hutong, in the heart of old Beijing (Jane Macartney writes). The men have just finished laying an electricity cable as part of the sweeping campaign by China to clean up its act.
Residents of this alley will no longer have to rely on filling their squat iron stoves with coal briquettes. Now their homes are equipped with electric heaters.
Li Yunjie is 74 and has lived in this lane all his life. He is delighted. “I chose to go for the Government scheme because they pay for two thirds — and without that I could never afford this. It’s much safer because I don’t have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning, and it’s cleaner.”
Another neighbour rails at a worker to move the rubble out of the alley — but Mr Li says that he is satisfied, after hearing accounts from families who have already made the switch. “They say it may be a little more expensive overall than coal but it’s a price I don’t mind paying to get our blue skies back.”

Beijing has already swapped about 94,000 coal stoves for electric heaters, but that does not even scratch the surface of China’s coal pollution — and the Government knows it.
Since 2007 China has been listed as the largest carbon emitter in the world, overtaking the United States. While officials insist that its emissions remain tiny compared with the United States on a per capita basis — at 5.8 tonnes compared with 25 tonnes for the average American — they are nevertheless accelerating projects to reduce that reliance.
It is a task that will take decades. About 70 per cent of all China’s energy needs are fuelled by coal and experts say that that figure will decline very slowly. However, leaders of the country’s Communist Party appear determined to show the world that they are aware of the cost of climate change to their nation.
President Hu and President Obama spoke by telephone this week about the issues that will dominate their summit in Beijing next month. Climate change was near the top. Neither leader gave any public hint of a significant shift in position but both made the right noises and voiced hopes for some kind of a deal being struck in Copenhagen.
Beijing continues to stress that it remains a developing country and should not be asked to make promises that will hinder its efforts to lift millions of its people out of poverty. It wants developed nations to give it more hi-tech, clean technologies, but there are many in Washington who are wary of making commitments, fearing that this could give China an economic edge.
China and the United States together account for about 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, fast-growing China’s emissions of carbon dioxide reached 6.8 billion tonnes, an increase of 178 per cent over 1990 levels, according to the IWR, a German energy institute. US emissions rose 17 per cent, to 6.4 billion tonnes. Midweek China and India signed a deal agreeing to stand together on climate change.
Both are among developing countries that argue they should not be required to set binding targets to reduce greenhouse gases because richer nations shoulder the greater responsibility for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and are already several steps ahead in terms of economic growth. They want the developed nations to lead the way with much bigger cuts.
China’s efforts, however, are not limited to the ancient, centuries-old alleys of Beijing. On the steppes of Inner Mongolia, the deserts of its far west and along its coast, China is racing to build wind farms. Capacity has doubled in each of the past four years and with 12.2 gigawatts of generating capacity it now ranks fourth in the world. Wind energy accounts for only 0.4 per cent of total electricity supply.
There are still plenty of coal-fired electricity plants coming online, although the pace has slowed slightly from the jaw-dropping one a week notched up in the past two to three years. Experts say that the increase has slowed from adding 100 gigawatts of coal power a year to about 80 gigawatts this year.
Yang Fuqiang, a climate change campaigner for the WWF, said: “This is better. But we have to change this trend and push the share of coal down. We must increase renewables.”
Global warming
In 2001 Beijing launched the Great Green Wall of China — a row of trees 2,800 miles (4,500km) long. The 35 billion trees are intended to stem the flow of sand from the Gobi Desert. Increasing droughts mean the deserts could reach the outskirts of the city by 2040, putting it at risk of becoming the world’s first capital to be swamped by sand
Source: Times database

Power Plants Face Potentially Costly New Air-Pollution Rules

By IAN TALLEY
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to issue new air-pollution rules for coal- and oil-fired power plants by November 2011, according to court documents.
While the new regulations will likely reduce emissions of cancer-causing pollutants by millions of tons annually, they could mean costly technology upgrades for the industry.
A consent decree released late Thursday follows a lawsuit filed by medical associations and environmental organizations against the EPA in December, alleging the agency wasn’t drafting new power-plant emission rules fast enough as required by the Clean Air Act.
At issue were final “maximum achievable control technology” emission standards for hazardous air pollutants such as mercury, arsenic, cadmium, other heavy metals, acid gases and dioxins. The agreement marks a major victory for the medical and environmental groups after years of legal battles against the industry and the Bush administration EPA.
“This is big,” said Ann Weeks, legal director at the Clean Air Task Force, who has been fighting for new standards for nearly a decade. “We are very pleased with the outcome of this case, and look forward to working with the EPA to develop emissions standards for this industry that mandate the deep cuts in this pollution that the law requires.”
The EPA said addressing hazardous pollutants emitted by utilities is a high priority. “the agency is committed to developing a strategy to reduce harmful emissions from these facilities, which threaten the air we all breathe,” the agency said. it plans to propose standards for oil and coal-fired generation by march 2011.
At American Electric Power Co., one of the nation’s largest operators of coal-fired power plants, spokesman Pat Hemlepp said the company was concerned the EPA won’t have time to fully review emissions and develop a sound technical basis for its rule. Southern Co. and Duke Energy Corp., also major operators of coal-fired power plants, didn’t have immediate comment.
Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the industry’s trade association, called the schedule “a pretty aggressive timeline for a new rule,” and expressed concern that the agency “may not be able to get the quality data it wants and needs” before it must act. The EPA earlier this year sought public comment on how to collect pollution data that would provide the basis for new emission regulations.
Mr. Riedinger said it is too early to estimate potential costs to the industry.
Ms. Weeks at the Clean Air Task Force dismissed concerns about costs, saying the health and societal benefits far outweigh the industry’s costs, which ultimately will be borne by electricity customers.
Write to Ian Talley at ian.talley@dowjones.com

US coal stands in way of Copenhagen

It’s not India and China that threaten the success of a new climate change treaty, but senators of coal-producing US states
Jeffrey Sachs
guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 October 2009 08.30 BST

The UN climate change treaty, signed in 1992, committed the world to avoiding “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Yet, since that time, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar.
The US has proved to be the biggest laggard in the world, refusing to sign the 1997 Kyoto protocol or to adopt any effective domestic emissions controls. As we head into the global summit in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto protocol, the US is once again the focus of concern. Even now, American politics remains strongly divided over climate change – though President Barack Obama has new opportunities to break the logjam.
A year after the 1992 treaty, President Bill Clinton tried to pass an energy tax that would have helped the US to begin reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. The proposal not only failed, but also triggered a political backlash. When the Kyoto protocol was adopted in 1997, Clinton did not even send it to the US Senate for ratification, knowing that it would be rejected. President George Bush repudiated the Kyoto protocol in 2001 and did essentially nothing on climate change during his presidency.
There are several reasons for US inaction – including ideology and scientific ignorance – but a lot comes down to one word: coal. No fewer than 25 states produce coal, which not only generates income, jobs and tax revenue, but also provides a disproportionately large share of their energy.
Per capita carbon emissions in US coal states tend to be much higher than the national average. Since addressing climate change is first and foremost directed at reduced emissions from coal – the most carbon-intensive of all fuels – America’s coal states are especially fearful about the economic implications of any controls (though the oil and automobile industries are not far behind).
The US political system poses special problems as well. To ratify a treaty requires the support of 67 of the Senate’s 100 members, a nearly impossible hurdle. The Republican party, with its 40 Senate seats, is simply filled with too many ideologues – and, indeed, too many senators intent on derailing any Obama initiative – to offer enough votes to reach the 67-vote threshold. Moreover, the Democratic party includes senators from coal and oil states who are unlikely to support decisive action.
The idea this time around is to avoid the need for 67 votes, at least at the start, by focusing on domestic legislation rather than a treaty. Under the US constitution, domestic legislation (as opposed to international treaties) requires a simple majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to be sent to the president for signature. Getting 50 votes for a climate change bill (with a tie vote broken by the vice president) is almost certain.
But opponents of legislation can threaten to filibuster (speak for an indefinite period and thereby paralyse Senate business), which can be ended only if 60 senators support bringing the legislation to a vote. Otherwise, proposed legislation can be killed, even if it has the support of a simple majority. That will certainly be true of domestic climate change legislation. Securing 60 votes is a steep hill to climb.
Political analysts know that the votes will depend on individual senators’ ideologies, states’ voting patterns, and states’ dependence on coal relative to other energy sources. Based on these factors, one analysis counts 50 likely Democratic yes votes and 34 Republican no votes, leaving 16 votes still in play. Ten of the swing votes are Democrats, mainly from coal states; the other six are Republicans who conceivably could vote with the president and the Democratic majority.
Until recently, many believed that China and India would be the real holdouts in the global climate change negotiations. Yet China has announced a set of major initiatives – in solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture technologies – to reduce its economy’s greenhouse gas intensity.
India, long feared to be a spoiler, has said that it is ready to adopt a significant national action plan to move towards a trajectory of sustainable energy. The two nations have agreed to co-ordinate efforts on renewable energy and research, and the US is under growing pressure to act. With developing countries displaying their readiness to reach a global deal, could the US Senate really prove to be the world’s last great holdout?
Obama has tools at his command to bring the US into the global mainstream on climate change. First, he is negotiating side deals with holdout senators to cushion the economic impact on coal states and to increase US investments in the research and development, and eventually adoption, of clean coal technologies.
Second, he can command the Environmental Protection Agency to impose administrative controls on coal plants and automobile producers even if the Congress does not pass new legislation. The administrative route might turn out to be even more important than the legislative route.
The politics of the US Senate should not obscure the larger point: America has acted irresponsibly since signing the climate treaty in 1992. It is the world’s largest and most powerful country, and the one most responsible for the climate change to this point, it has behaved without any sense of duty – to its own citizens, to the world, and to future generations.
Even coal state senators should be ashamed. Sure, their states need some extra help, but narrow interests should not be permitted to endanger our planet’s future. It is time for the US to rejoin the global family.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

Australian oil spill ‘contaminating one of world’s richest marine wildernesses’

WWF expedition into Timor Sea finds dolphins, sea birds, turtles and other marine wildlife at risk in oil spill that began in August
Toni O’Loughlin in Sydney
guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 October 2009 17.20 BST
Conservationists warned yesterday that one of Australia’s worst off-shore oil spills was killing wildlife and “massively contaminating” one of the world’s last great wildnernesses. Amid a fourth attempt to plug the 64-day-old leak at the Montara drilling rig, the slick – which has already spread over an area 10 times the size of London – continued to expand at the rate of 300 barrels of oil a day in an area of the Timor Sea famed for its marine reserves and coral.
A survey by the Worldwide Fund for Nature found dolphins, migratory sea birds, sea snakes and marine turtles were exposed to toxins. The slick has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals.
Since August 21 when there was an accident at the Montara offshore drilling rig’s well head, around 403,000 litres of oil have been pumped into the Timor Sea. The rig is owned by the Thai oil company PTTEP.
Satellite images show a 25,000 square kilometre slick spreading across the surface of the ocean and spilling into Indonesian waters, threatening the marine reserves of Ashmore and Cartier reefs along the way.
WWF director of conservation Dr Gilly Llewellyn, who conducted a three day expedition through the polluted waters, said if the spill were closer to shore there would be global outrage. “There were times when we were literally in a sea of oil from left to right and as far as we could see ahead of us - it was heavily oiled water and it was sickening because in this we were seeing dolphins surfacing,” Llewellyn said.
“We recorded hundreds of dolphins and sea birds in the oil slick area, as well as sea snakes and threatened hawksbill and flatback turtles. Clearly, wildlife is dying and hundreds if not thousands of dolphins, seabirds and sea-snakes are being exposed to toxic oil,” Llewellyn said.
The expedition recorded 17 species of seabird, four species of dolphins and five marine reptiles including two species of marine turtle.
However the paucity of research on the marine life in the area has hampered attempts to document the damage.
Still, Llewellyn says experience from previous oil disasters suggests the damage will be long lasting. “We know that oil can be a slow and silent killer. Impacts from the Exxon Valdez disaster are still being seen 20 years later, so we can expect this environmental disaster will continue to unfold for years to come,” she said.
When oil, gas and condensate began seeping into the Timor Sea PTTEP estimated it would take 50 days to plug the well which is located about 250 kilometres off the Kimberley region of the West Australian coast line. Three previous attempts by PTTEP Australasia to plug the leak, 2.5 kilometres below the sea bed by pumping it full of heavy mud have failed.
Australia’s federal environment minister, Peter Garrett, said he was confident everything possible was being done to stop the oil leak