The atrocities in Brussels – and they are horrific, criminal atrocities – are not occurring in a vacuum.

They are not springing from some unfathomable abyss of motiveless malevolence.

They are a response, in kind, to the atrocious violence being committed by Western powers on a regular basis in many countries around the world.

And just as there is no justification for the acts of carnage in Brussels (and Paris and Turkey and elsewhere), there is likewise no justification for the much larger and more murderous acts of carnage being carried out by the most powerful and prosperous nations on earth, day after day, year after year.

The Western powers know this. For many years, their own intelligence agencies – in study after study – have confirmed that the leading cause of violent ‘radicalization’ among a small number of Muslims is the violent Western intervention in Muslim lands.

These interventions are carried out for the purpose of securing the economic and political domination of Western interests over lands rich with energy resources, as well as their strategic surroundings.

The primitive world view of global dominance

That they have not even the slightest connection to ‘liberating’ people from religious or political persecution, or making the world ‘safer’, is glaringly transparent. They are about domination, pure and simple.

Indeed, this point is scarcely disputed, although champions of domination claim it is a good thing. For decades, one has heard the argument from American exceptionalists that ‘if we don’t do it’ – that is, if we don’t dominate the world militarily and economically – ‘then somebody else will.’ The implication, of course, is that such a ‘somebody else’ will be far worse than our own divinely blessed, goodhearted selves.

There is a fiercely primitive worldview underlying this philosophy (which is held almost universally across the American political spectrum, and in those countries who cling to the coattails of American dominance). It says that violent domination is the only reality in human affairs: one must dominate, or be dominated. One must eat or be eaten. One must kill or be killed. There is no alternative.

If ‘we’ don’t dominate – by force if necessary, doing ‘whatever it takes’ – then it is a given that some other power will do so. Domination and power are all that exists; the only question is how they are distributed, and who controls that distribution. And there is no price too high to pay in order to gain – or maintain – that control.

You can see how this primitive belief plays out in domestic politics, too. More and more, politics across the Western democracies (and other nations as well) are revolving around the question of who should dominate in a society – or more specifically, who feels their domination over society is being threatened.

This dynamic is driving nationalist movements across the board. In the United States, it is expressed in the panic and dismay felt by an increasing number of white people – especially but by no means exclusively white males – that their ‘natural’ domination of American society is slipping away. They want to ‘take our country back’ or else they’ll be overwhelmed – dominated – by a flood of unworthy others: African-Americans, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals, women, etc.

This self-pitying fear has been rife in right-wing discourse for decades, and has now burst into the open, and into the mainstream, with the likely nomination of Donald Trump as presidential candidate of a major party.

Whatever happened to the idea of equality?

Again, the dynamic of domination is key: since nothing exists outside this dynamic, since there is no other way, then one group must dominate the others. The idea of equal citizens working, living, and sharing together is a fantasy in this worldview. If blacks or immigrants or women or gays are perceived to have gained a small share in the national life, then that share must have been ‘taken’ from the dominant group.

And since, in this view, domination is the goal of all groups, since it is the organizing principle of human life, then those upstart groups are not just seeking a fair share of society’s bounty and freedoms and opportunities; no, they are actually aiming to subjugate the dominant group. In this extremely limited worldview, life is always a zero-sum game.

To give someone else more opportunity means less for yourself, and your kind. The freer someone else is, the less free you are. There is only so much to go around. You will find more sophisticated and empathetic worldviews on grade-school playgrounds, or in wolf packs.

And so we come to the foreign policies of Western nations today. They are all, without exception, built on the goal of securing effective control (in whatever form) of economic and strategic resources for the benefit of their own power structures.

Again, it is beyond dispute that these policies do not involve trying to make the world a better, safer place so that their own citizens might pursue their lives in peace. These policies manifestly do not involve trying to achieve ‘security’ for their own people. Those who advance these policies knowingly and deliberately accept the fact that they will invariably cause destruction abroad and ‘blowback’ at home.

They know and accept that these policies will destabilize the world, that they will radicalize some of those who suffer from them, that they will lead to less security at home, that they will drain public treasuries and leave their own people to sink in broken communities with decaying infrastructure, mounting debt, shrinking opportunities, bleak futures and despairing lives.

if the price is right …

They know all of this is true – not only because they can see it happening with their own eyes, as we all can, but also because their own experts tell them, time and time again, that this is so. But they accept all this as the price that must be paid to advance and maintain their dominance.

In the words of Madeline Albright, when she was confronted with the fact that the US/UK sanctions on Iraq had at that time killed at least 500,000 children, our leaders believe this price “is worth it.”

In private, they no doubt tell themselves that it is the domination of their good and ‘special’ nation, or the domination of the worthy ‘values’ of ‘Western civilization’ that they are trying to secure with their policies, by doing ‘whatever it takes’. But in practice, of course, the chief beneficiaries of these policies are invariably the ruling classes of the nations involved.

This has become much more brazenly evident in recent years, as the conditions and prospects of even the middle classes are so clearly deteriorating. There is little room left to pretend that the ‘rising tide’ of militarized hyper-capitalism is ‘lifting all boats’ when even those who once benefitted from expanding opportunity (in the post-war boom) are now sinking. (The poor, of course, have almost always been invisible.)

The people in Brussels – like the people in Paris, and like the far greater multitude of victims in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc – are, yes, ‘reaping the whirlwind’ of Western foreign policy. The criminals who carried out the most recent attacks have adopted the mindset of our Western elites, who teach the world, day after day, that the destruction of innocent lives is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve your objectives.

You can and must do ‘whatever it takes’ – even if whatever it takes is, say, the death of half a million innocent children. Or a war of aggression that leaves a million innocent people dead. Or drone-bombing a wedding party. Or sending missiles into a hospital.

Or sitting in the Oval Office – your Peace Prize gleaming on the mantelpiece – while you tick off the names of victims on your weekly ‘Kill List’.

No justification for violence!

We wonder how these terrorists can commit such barbarous atrocities as we see in Brussels – even while most of us happily countenance, even celebrate, far more extensive and continuous atrocities committed by our leaders in pursuit of domination. Then we pretend that the former has no connection to the latter.

Yet the targets of these foreign policies live through a hundred Brussels attacks, a dozen 9/11s every year. We teach violence to the world – brutal destruction of individual lives, of societies and communities, of entire nations – yet are shocked when the world responds in kind.

I will say it again: there is absolutely no justification for the murder of innocent people such as we saw in Brussels yesterday. None. But crimes of equal horror – killing innocent people, disrupting the lives of millions of others, and filling them with fear – are being carried out, routinely, and on a much larger scale, by the leaders of our Western nations and their allies.

This is too is equally unjustifiable, and is worthy of the same level of rejection and outrage we rightly apply to the Brussels atrocity.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island.

Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 – the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered ‘unsafe’ on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called ‘Bravo’. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

You, too, can have a bikini body. Be careful what you wish for

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.”

A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different ‘bikini bodies’. Each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers. Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally.

Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

Obama’s ‘Operation Yellow Peril’

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a ‘threat’. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called ‘freedom of navigation’.

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western ‘mainstream’ – a Dan Rather equivalent, say – asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

And now Trump is ‘unleashing the dark forces of violence’?

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China.

‘Hillary’ – because she’s worth it?

The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras.

Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting ‘Hillary’. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

How easily we are fooled …

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as ‘identity politics’ stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported – such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self absorption, a kind of ‘me-ism’, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

John Pilger is a writer, documentary film-maker, producer, director, and reporter. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigous Sophie Prize for ’30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.’ In 2009, he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

This article is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled ‘A World War Has Begun’. It was originally published on his website.

Follow John Pilger on Twitter@ @johnpilger.

The sole eyewitness to Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres’ assassination on March 3, 2016 has gone from being wounded victim to, effectively, political prisoner.

Now Gustavo Castro Soto may also be framed as the murderer of his long-time friend.

Both the Mexican Ambassador, Dolores Jiménez, and Castro himself are worried that he will be charged by the government for the killing, they told the National Commission of Human Rights of Honduras on March 16.

A writer and organizer for environmental and economic justice, Castro has been forbidden by local authorities from leaving the country to return to his native Mexico until April 6, at least.  Since being released from several days in Honduran government custody, he has been forced to take refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

The protection of the Mexican Embassy “does not mean that my life is no longer in danger”, Castro wrote to some friends and colleagues on March 4. As long as he is on Honduran soil, he remains in peril. Ambassador Jiménez called the risk he is running “an objective fact.”

Castro – who is able to identify Cáceres’ killer – is an impediment to the plan that the Honduran government is clearly advancing, which is to pin the murder on members of the group which Cáceres founded and ran, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations (COPINH). It could help the strategy of the fraudulently elected regime to dispense with Castro by charging and arresting him.

The government may also charge COPINH members with the killing of their leader, in the hopes of eliminating them from the body politic. Authorities tried to incriminate three of them just after the murder.

• Prominent COPINH organizer Aureliano Molina was imprisoned for two days on suspicion of a ‘crime of passion’ though he was two hours away from La Esperanza on the night of March 3.
• Two other COPINH leaders, Tomas Gómez and Sotero Echeverria, were interrogated for days, during which time the government denied their request for accompaniment by their lawyers. On March 15, Echeverria was threatened with arrest.

The real assassins

Cáceres was a tireless organizer for accountable government, participatory democracy, indigenous peoples and their territories, human rights, and women’s and LGBTQ rights.  For many years, she was subject to threats, attempted violent attacks, legal prosecution for being a “continual danger to the nation”, and other persecution.

Just during the three-month period prior to Cáceres’ murder, human rights accompaniers tracked eleven threats and attempted assaults by national and local government officials, police, soldiers, employees of the Agua Zarca dam project which Cáceres and others were fighting, and unidentified men.

In addition to that litany within 10 days before Cáceres’ death, Agua Zarca released two incendiary public email announcements. Their message lines read “THE VIOLENT ACTS” and “FALSEHOODS OF BERTA CACERES  – COPINH”.

Those who have witnessed the price Cáceres has paid for her decades of advocacy have no doubt who is culpable in her murder. Her four grown children and mother stated publicly on March 5,

“We hold the company DESA responsible for the persecution, the criminalization, the stigma, and the constant death threats made against her and our people of COPINH. We also hold the financial and international entities that support the project such as, the Dutch development bank FMO, Finn Fund, BCIE, Ficohsa, and the committed companies CASTOR, and business group ATALA, responsible for her death.

“We hold the Honduran State responsible for having largely impeded the protection of our Bertha and for having favored her persecution, criminalization and assassination by having opted for protecting the company’s interests above the decisions and mandates of the community …

“The ones responsible for her assassination are the business groups in collaboration with the national government, the municipal government and the repressive institutions of the State, who are behind the extractive project that is developing in the region. The funders of these extractive death projects are also responsible for the death of our Bertha and of countless people who struggle against the exploitation of our territories.”

Castro’s ordeal

Many elements of the government’s so-called collection of evidence from Castro have been irregular at best, and illegal at worst.

Beyond being inconvenient for knowing too much, the eyewitness falls into the repressive government’s category of public enemy. Like Cáceres, Castro has been a vocal opponent of dam construction on indigenous rivers, as well as of the broad powers given transnational corporations and the local elite to plunder democracy and the riches of nature.

Castro is coordinator of the group Otros Mundos / Friends of the Earth Mexico. He has cofounded, and sits on the governing body of, many anti-mining and anti-damming networks, as well as the US-based organization Other Worlds. In his interrogation, the public prosecutor has asked  Castro about his environmental organizing and history of activism.

Following the killing in Cáceres’ home in the town of La Esperanza, Castro was detained for days in the local public prosecutor’s office for interrogation. On March 5, having been told the questioning was complete, he was transported by the Mexican ambassador and consul to the airport in Tegucigalpa so that he could return to his homeland.

As he approached the migration checkpoint, Castro was set upon by multiple Honduran police, who attempted to grab him. The Mexican ambassador stopped them.

The government has since forbidden Castro from leaving Honduras for 30 days, or until April 6. When Castro appealed the order, the judge in the case ruled against it, even while admitting that there is no legal provision for a 30-day restraint for witnesses or victims.

The judge also suspended the license of Castro’s lawyer, Ivania Galeano, for 15 days. The stated reason was that Galeano had requested a copy of Castro’s file which, according to Honduran law, was her right.  

Even in the Mexican Embassy, almost three weeks after the killing, Castro continues to be interrogated by the Honduran prosecutor.

Hearing no protest from the US, Honduran Government ramps up repression

The US State Department put out a brief, generic statement of condolence the day after Cáceres was assassinated. At the same time, according to email communications, the State Department confirmed that it is cooperating with the Honduran government in the investigation, with various US agencies actively participating in it.

The Obama Administration has failed to raise questions about the Honduran government’s role in the murder, given its persistent, well-documented targeting of Cáceres over the years, and its transparent attempts at a cover-up by fingering Cáceres’ close colleagues. US military assistance to the Honduran government continues to flow.

On March 17, 62 US Congressional representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, calling for an independent investigation of the assassination and urging the Secretary to immediately stop US security funding pending a review. Rep. Hank Johnson, co-sponsor of the letter along with Rep. Keith Ellison, said,

“It’s time for our government to leverage security assistance and multilateral loans so as to put real and lasting pressure on the Honduran government to protect its activists and pursue those responsible for these hideous crimes.”

Meanwhile, the silence from the administration has given the Honduran government a green light for repression.

That repression was aggressively launched on March 15. On that single day, Honduran soldiers and police coordinated assaults against ten activists from four geographic regions and three separate organizations.

• Nelson García, a COPINH leader, was assassinated during a violent government eviction of the community of Rio Chiquito.
• As stated above, police threatened Sotero Echeverria, member of the COPINH coordinating committee, with arrest.
• In the capitol, three hit men shot and wounded Christian Mauricio Alegría, who works with the global peasant movement La Via Campesina. His uncle, Rafael Alegría, is a deputy in the national parliament from the opposition Libre Party, and is former secretary general of La Via Campesina.
• José Flores, head of the United Movement of the Peasants of the Aguan (MUCA), was temporarily arrested along with family members in the town of Tocoa.

The message was clear to all. No matter where one is or with whom one works, activists are not safe in Honduras.

From the Mexican Embassy on 15th March, Castro sent out a note of condolence and support to the Honduran people. He closed the missive this way: “Soon there will be justice.”

Take action here to call for safety for Gustavo Castro and members of COPINH, as well as for a fair, internationally led investigation into Berta Cáceres’ killing.

Beverly Bell is founder of Other Worlds and more than a dozen international organizations and networks, Beverly is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Beverly has worked for more than three decades as an organizer, advocate, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. Her focus areas are just economies; democratic participation; and rights for women, indigenous peoples, and other excluded peoples.

Books by Beverley Bell

• Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti’s Divide;
• Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance;
• Birthing Justice: Women Creating Social and Economic Alternatives;
• Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agriculture Systems in the Americas.

This article is Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds. It was originally published on Other Worlds.

Three of the US’s biggest food companies have yielded to the inevitable and announced they will be labeling GM ingredients on their products across the entire country: Mars, General Mills and now Kelloggs.

The labels will be set out in compliance with the Vermont Act 120 passed in May 2014 which mandates that all ingredients derived from GMOs must be clearly labeled on food product packaging. The law has been implemented in as Vermont’s Consumer Protection Rule 121 which takes effect in July 2016.

The move follows the narrow defeat last week of the DARK (Denying Americans the Right to Know) Act by the US Senate, which voted 49-48 to temporarily halt the bill’s progress. If passed into the law, the DARK Act would remove states’ right to require GMO labeling.

Although the Senate vote did not kill the DARK Act outright, it both introduced a delay and gave a strong indication that the sentiment of senators, following intensive lobbying from their constutuents, was turning against the industry-supported legislation, strongly backed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

Properly known as H.R. 1599, the ‘Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act’, the DARK Act was introduced to Congress by Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) and was passed 275-150 on 23rd July 2015.

But with Vermont’s CP121 coming into effect this summer, food companies are having to move fast to ensure that their product labels are compliant following the Senate’s surprise vote.

Mars and General Mills: ‘we are doing this because we have to’

First to announce the move was General Mills, whose statement reads: “As the discussions continue in Washington, one thing is very clear: Vermont state law requires us to start labeling certain grocery store food packages that contain GMO ingredients or face significant fines.

“We can’t label our products for only one state without significantly driving up costs for our consumers and we simply will not do that. The result: consumers all over the U.S. will soon begin seeing words legislated by the state of Vermont on the labels of many of their favorite General Mills products.”

Mars has also just released a statement of its own position on GMOs, which includes the key words: “In 2014, the state of Vermont passed a mandatory genetically modified (GM) ingredient labeling law that requires most human food products containing GM ingredients to include on-pack labeling as of July 2016.

“To comply with that law, Mars is introducing clear, on-pack labeling on our products that contain GM ingredients nationwide.”

But Mars is equivocal on whether it sees any need – other than the legal requirement – to label its GMO ingredients. “At Mars, we not only ensure the safety of all raw materials in our products, we’re also committed to being transparent with our consumers so they can understand what’s in the products they love”, it states.

But it then adds: “We firmly believe GM ingredients are safe. Food developed through biotechnology has been studied extensively and judged safe by a broad range of regulatory agencies, scientists, health professionals, and other experts around the world.”

General Mills: ‘we need a national solution’

General Mills statement continues: “With the Vermont labeling legislation upon us, and with the distinct possibility that other states will enact different labeling requirements, what we need is simple: We need a national solution.”

Of course the DARK Act would provide a national solution – just not one that gives consumers a clear right to know what is in their food. Moreover the US Senate has clearly signalled its disapproval of the proposed legislation.

However there is an alternative, the ‘Biotechnology Food Labeling Uniformity’ bill, introduced early this month by four Democrat senators: Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley; Vermont Senators Patrick Leahy and Jon Tester; and California’s Dianne Feinstein.

“This bill is an important step forward to give consumers a uniform national mandatory label, and it seeks to address the needs of food producers by giving them a suite of options to comply with a mandatory national label”, said Leahy, a current member and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, as he introduced the legislation to the Senate.

“I believe that until a national mandatory label like this is enacted, Congress should not preempt state laws, like Vermont’s Act 120.”

The bill immediately won the support of progressive food companies and consumer advocates, including Amy’s Kitchen, Ben and Jerry’s, Campbell’s Soup Company, Consumers Union, Just Label It, and Nature’s Path.

Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union, said: “This is what real disclosure looks like. This bill finds a way to set a national standard and avoid a patchwork of state labeling laws while still giving consumers the information they want and deserve about what’s in their food.

“This compromise offers food companies different labeling options and ensures that all consumers – no matter where they are in the country or whether they own a smartphone – have the information they overwhelmingly say they want. We urge Senators to support this proposal as they move forward on GMO labeling legislation.”

Now, who’s next?

Campbell’s Soup announced its own move to label GMO ingredients in January, stating: “Campbell has been actively involved in trying to resolve this issue since 2011. We’ve worked with GMA, legislators and regulators to forge a national voluntary solution. We’ve engaged a variety of stakeholders, from lawmakers to activists. I’ve personally made multiple trips to Capitol Hill to meet with elected officials.

“Despite these efforts, Congress has not been able to resolve this issue. We now believe that proposing a mandatory national solution is necessary. Printing a clear and simple statement on the label is the best solution for consumers and for Campbell.”

And many more companies now appear certain to follow in coming days and weeks – or be forced to withdraw from the Vermont market. Kelloggs, the latest company to announce it will be complying with the Vermont law, has yet to release a statement.

The GMA set out its position in a statement in which it effectively concedes defeat – for now: “Today’s announcement is the latest example of how Vermont’s looming labeling mandate is a serious problem for businesses. Food companies are being forced to make decisions on how to comply and having to spend millions of dollars. One small state’s law is setting labeling standards for consumers across the country.

“GMA member companies such as General Mills are individually deciding how they will comply with the Vermont law, even as the company is working with other food manufacturers, retailers and agriculture groups to continue to push for passage of the federal bill that would protect consumers, farmers and small businesses from a costly patchwork of state labeling laws.

“This announcement should give new urgency to the need for action on a national law when the Senate returns from its recess in April.”

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

On the weekend I debated climate change with someone who denies the Earth is warming and someone who denies CO₂ is a greenhouse gas. Today’s flat Earthers.

The debate was on prime time TV with over one million viewers – BBC1’s The Big Questions.

The topic – ‘Has the time come to take climate change seriously?’ – was chosen following NASA data showing February 2016 was the hottest month on record – and it is welcome for such important developments to be discussed on prime time television.

The arguments of Piers Corbyn and Rupert Darwell were ridiculed – including by host Nicky Campbell – and anyone watching would have known they are marginal views beyond the scientific consensus.

There is no shortage of scientific data to confound their arguments but the debate format did not allow for a serious exchange of evidence. Indeed when I proposed a climate scientist be invited I was told this is a programme about morality not science.

The format of The Big Questions is four guests invited to debate each issue (guests are also encouraged to pitch in on other topics). In this case two guests invited to debate climate change were climate sceptics or deniers, and two represent the position evidenced by science.

There’s only one real climate change debate: what should we do about it?

When I agreed to appear, sceptic Rupert Darwell had been invited but not climate denier Piers Corbyn. I pointed out that the BBC has previously been slammed for ‘false balance’ in their reporting of climate change and strongly argued that their fourth guest should not be a climate denier – and should be a climate scientist.

Host Nicky Campbell raised an important point that a survey has suggested that 56% of Conservative MPs doubt climate change is caused by human activity – and that misconceptions need to be addressed.

But these views will be changed by serious attention given to scientific evidence, and by halting the constant reinforcement of the perception that there is a meaningful debate to be had about whether climate change is happening – not by a Sunday morning dose of people confusing opinion with evidence.

All this would matter less were we not in a time-critical period – global climate changing emissions must start to decline in a handful of years to prevent runaway temperature rises.

Already some of the Earth’s systems that we rely on are under extreme stress – the Amazon rainforest is drying, the frozen tundra that traps millions of years of the powerful greenhouse gas methane is thawing, and Arctic sea ice extent is at an historic low.

We don’t have the luxury of rehearsing debates of yesteryear and reinforcing the idea that the debate focus is whether climate change is happening or not.

What if climate change is a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

My challenge to the climate deniers is what are they scared of? What if climate change is a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

The economic and social benefits make many low carbon policies and approaches worth pursuing regardless of climate change. There is clear evidence that countries at different levels of economic development can achieve stronger economic growth, reduce poverty, advance development goals, and reduce climate risk at the same time.

More than a decade ago it used to be argued that tackling climate change would cost economies. Now we know that using resources more efficiently, creating co-benefits like healthier workers, and giving access to electricity – through solar power – to millions of people previously relying on wood stoves is good for economies as well as the wellbeing of people and the planet.

What would be so bad about curbing deforestation, restoring nature, creating more sustainable agriculture that doesn’t devastate soils and pollute waterways? Is there a problem with limiting our runaway use of plastic that is becoming a toxic slurry in the oceans and bloating landfill sites? If we only used the energy-intensive drinking water that we need would we really suffer? Or would we just have to get used to slightly different habits?

Is getting to grips with your central heating timer and switching the light off when you leave a room too terrifying? Would better insulated homes powered by renewable energy that are both more comfortable and cheaper to run be a problem? Cyclists are about to outnumber cars in central London – is that something to be feared?

UK remains stuck in the dirty past

There will be winners and losers in the shift to a low carbon economy. The fossil fuel industry is on its way out. We need to ensure a genuinely supported and joined up transition for the people involved in fossil fuel industries – seizing their skills for the new low carbon, high tech, resource-efficient economy. Globally there will be winners and losers too.

China is cutting its carbon even faster than promised – with net emission falling by 1.5% last year. It has announced a halt to building coal power plants, is closing many down. It is by far the biggest investor in solar energy in the world and is becoming the market leader in many clean energy technologies like electric buses.

The UK risks being a loser. We are the only G7 country to increase subsidies for fossil fuels – compounded by a further £1bn giveaway in last week’s Budget, and even after David Cameron joined world leaders in Paris in December last year pledging to keep global temperature rises to 1.5C. If we are wedded to obsolete high-carbon energy and infrastructure it will become an increasingly expensive drag on our economy.

If we want a debate about the morality of climate change let’s not debate whether climate change is happening – that isn’t a matter of opinion. Let’s debate how we make the transition to a low carbon economy in the fairest way. Let’s debate who will be the winners and losers and whether we’re getting the balance right.

Let’s debate the morality of the UK’s responsibility for cutting carbon in relation to the rest of the world. Now they are really Big Questions.

Liz Hutchins is Senior Campaigner in the Political and Legal Unit of Friends of the Earth England, Wales & Northern Ireland.

An 18-month battle to discover the true cost to consumers of building the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactors is to come to a climax in London.

The Information Commissioner has been blocking freedom of information requests to publish subsidy documents held by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

However, it has finally agreed to an oral hearing on the issue before the Information Tribunal.

The decision comes just before EDF’s chief executive in Britain, Vincent de Rivaz, faces a grilling from MPs about the £18bn cost of Hinkley, which is underwritten through subsidies and customer bills.

EDF is yet to make a final decision on whether to go ahead with the project and MPs have said there are “serious questions” to answer about Hinkley’s viability.

Thomas Piquemal, EDF’s finance director quit two weeks ago over concerns about Hinkley’s impact on the already heavily indebted company. However, David Cameron and François Hollande have strongly backed the project as “a pillar of the bilateral relationship” and “a key aspect of Britain’s energy policy”.

The government has agreed to pay £92.50 a megawatt hour for Hinkley’s electricity in 2012 pounds, index-linked to the Consumer Price Index. That was about double the wholesale price when the deal was reached but now represents almost three times the wholesale power price due to rises in the CPI and power price declines.

Today’s school leavers will be paying for HPC until they draw their pensions

Greenpeace and Request Initiative, a Freedom of Information Act specialist, has been trying since 2014 to obtain the contents of seven documents that are understood to contain further details about the subsidies for Hinkley.

They were submitted to the European Commission as justification for the need to provide state aid, which is generally against competition rules.

Greenpeace said it was extraordinary that the Information Commissioner had been supporting DECC’s wish to keep vital information away from the public. The environmental group now hopes progress can be made at an Information Tribunal hearing expected to take place in London in May.

Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace, said: “Bizarrely, the Information Commissioner and DECC are hell bent on keeping the evidence showing Hinkley is a good idea for Britain a secret. The reports we have been trying to see for 18 months illustrate the assumptions that DECC used to decide that Hinkley is the best bet to power Britain in the future.

“We think it’s hard to think of any reason it should be kept secret unless the evidence shows that Hinkley isn’t such a good idea. The argument it has to remain a secret because it would damage the government’s negotiations is now over because the negotiations have finished.

“Today’s school leavers will be paying for Hinkley until they’re about to draw their pensions. The government should tell future generations what they are paying for and why.”

Commissioner: ‘commercial secrecy trumps public interest’

The information in the documents was largely prepared for ministers by advisers such as KPMG, Poyry and Oxera, with modelling work and scenario planning by DECC itself.

The preliminary view of the bureaucrats in Brussels was that the measures constituted unlawful financial support, but the final decision reversed this and gave the UK government the green light.

Greenpeace asked for access to the documents and then launched a Freedom of Information request for them to be handed over, which was opposed by DECC.

The Information Commissioner initially agreed to withhold the documents on the grounds that “the reports contain and discuss matters of a sensitive commercial nature and the information was provided to DECC in the expectation that it would be treated as confidential”.

It also accepted that the disclosure of the information would “disadvantage the government in the context of future negotiations with other (nuclear plant) developers”.

The Commissioner said there is a strong public interest in disclosing the contents of the documents. but said this was overridden by the other considerations around commercial sensitivity.

But despite this, it has accepted that an oral hearing is “appropriate” in this case. The Information Commissioner said he had no further comments to make ahead of the hearing but DECC justified its commitment to keeping the documents under wraps.

DECC: ‘commercial sensitivity’

A spokesperson for the department said: “The decision to withhold these documents is due to commercial sensitivity in accordance with exceptions set out in the Environmental Information Regulations.

“The Information Commissioner supported this decision and we appreciate that this is now is the subject of a live appeal and we can’t comment any further whilst the appeal process is ongoing.”

EDF itself has always argued that it is totally committed to transparency, saying this would separate the nuclear industry from the secrecy that characterised it in the past.

Last September de Rivaz said: “At EDF Energy, transparency is at the heart of everything we do. It is our responsibility, as the custodians of Britain’s nuclear fleet, to be transparent, open and receptive to questions.

“We are approaching the Final Investment Decision for our new nuclear project Hinkley Point C. As we do, scrutiny has naturally increased. Just as we embrace transparency, we welcome scrutiny. We relish challenge based on facts.”

With two legal challenges agains the Hinkley C subsidy package proceeding, the importance of the so far secret documents cannot be overstated.

If it turns out that they contain significant errors of fact or argument, based on which the Commission decided that the HPC subsidy package was legal, then this would assist the litigants greatly in making their claim that the Commission’s approval was legally invalid.

Terry Macalister is Energy Editor at the Guardian. He tweets @TerryMac999.

This article was originally published on the Guardian and is republished here with thanks via the Guardian Environment Network. This version includes some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

An 18-month battle to discover the true cost to consumers of building the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactors is to come to a climax in London.

The Information Commissioner has been blocking freedom of information requests to publish subsidy documents held by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

However, it has finally agreed to an oral hearing on the issue before the Information Tribunal.

The decision comes just before EDF’s chief executive in Britain, Vincent de Rivaz, faces a grilling from MPs about the £18bn cost of Hinkley, which is underwritten through subsidies and customer bills.

EDF is yet to make a final decision on whether to go ahead with the project and MPs have said there are “serious questions” to answer about Hinkley’s viability.

Thomas Piquemal, EDF’s finance director quit two weeks ago over concerns about Hinkley’s impact on the already heavily indebted company. However, David Cameron and François Hollande have strongly backed the project as “a pillar of the bilateral relationship” and “a key aspect of Britain’s energy policy”.

The government has agreed to pay £92.50 a megawatt hour for Hinkley’s electricity in 2012 pounds, index-linked to the Consumer Price Index. That was about double the wholesale price when the deal was reached but now represents almost three times the wholesale power price due to rises in the CPI and power price declines.

Today’s school leavers will be paying for HPC until they draw their pensions

Greenpeace and Request Initiative, a Freedom of Information Act specialist, has been trying since 2014 to obtain the contents of seven documents that are understood to contain further details about the subsidies for Hinkley.

They were submitted to the European Commission as justification for the need to provide state aid, which is generally against competition rules.

Greenpeace said it was extraordinary that the Information Commissioner had been supporting DECC’s wish to keep vital information away from the public. The environmental group now hopes progress can be made at an Information Tribunal hearing expected to take place in London in May.

Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace, said: “Bizarrely, the Information Commissioner and DECC are hell bent on keeping the evidence showing Hinkley is a good idea for Britain a secret. The reports we have been trying to see for 18 months illustrate the assumptions that DECC used to decide that Hinkley is the best bet to power Britain in the future.

“We think it’s hard to think of any reason it should be kept secret unless the evidence shows that Hinkley isn’t such a good idea. The argument it has to remain a secret because it would damage the government’s negotiations is now over because the negotiations have finished.

“Today’s school leavers will be paying for Hinkley until they’re about to draw their pensions. The government should tell future generations what they are paying for and why.”

Commissioner: ‘commercial secrecy trumps public interest’

The information in the documents was largely prepared for ministers by advisers such as KPMG, Poyry and Oxera, with modelling work and scenario planning by DECC itself.

The preliminary view of the bureaucrats in Brussels was that the measures constituted unlawful financial support, but the final decision reversed this and gave the UK government the green light.

Greenpeace asked for access to the documents and then launched a Freedom of Information request for them to be handed over, which was opposed by DECC.

The Information Commissioner initially agreed to withhold the documents on the grounds that “the reports contain and discuss matters of a sensitive commercial nature and the information was provided to DECC in the expectation that it would be treated as confidential”.

It also accepted that the disclosure of the information would “disadvantage the government in the context of future negotiations with other (nuclear plant) developers”.

The Commissioner said there is a strong public interest in disclosing the contents of the documents. but said this was overridden by the other considerations around commercial sensitivity.

But despite this, it has accepted that an oral hearing is “appropriate” in this case. The Information Commissioner said he had no further comments to make ahead of the hearing but DECC justified its commitment to keeping the documents under wraps.

DECC: ‘commercial sensitivity’

A spokesperson for the department said: “The decision to withhold these documents is due to commercial sensitivity in accordance with exceptions set out in the Environmental Information Regulations.

“The Information Commissioner supported this decision and we appreciate that this is now is the subject of a live appeal and we can’t comment any further whilst the appeal process is ongoing.”

EDF itself has always argued that it is totally committed to transparency, saying this would separate the nuclear industry from the secrecy that characterised it in the past.

Last September de Rivaz said: “At EDF Energy, transparency is at the heart of everything we do. It is our responsibility, as the custodians of Britain’s nuclear fleet, to be transparent, open and receptive to questions.

“We are approaching the Final Investment Decision for our new nuclear project Hinkley Point C. As we do, scrutiny has naturally increased. Just as we embrace transparency, we welcome scrutiny. We relish challenge based on facts.”

With two legal challenges agains the Hinkley C subsidy package proceeding, the importance of the so far secret documents cannot be overstated.

If it turns out that they contain significant errors of fact or argument, based on which the Commission decided that the HPC subsidy package was legal, then this would assist the litigants greatly in making their claim that the Commission’s approval was legally invalid.

Terry Macalister is Energy Editor at the Guardian. He tweets @TerryMac999.

This article was originally published on the Guardian and is republished here with thanks via the Guardian Environment Network. This version includes some additional reporting by The Ecologist.