Lynas: China Rigged Copenhagen For Failure So As To Pin The Blame For It On Obama

This doesn’t surprise me one bit, really:

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about
what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and
inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the
talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful
“deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I
know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two
weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if
the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the
aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all
took the bait…

…. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, made the mistake of
singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage
a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again.
Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba
Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as “a suicide pact, an
incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a
few countries”.

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of
countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its
battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the
deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in
public.

And they did it pretty much because they could — and because even with their glaciers melting, the glaciers that supply their rivers, scoring points off the US is far, far more important than making sure the world as a whole survives.

The one thing, besides Lynas’ presence, that kept the Chinese from getting clean away with it: Obama’s breaking into one of the secret meetings the Chinese were holding; the cat started to get out of the bag at that point.

(Crossposted at The Seminal.)

UPDATE: I for one should have known something was up when a bunch of nations that turned out to be China’s proxies started hollering over draft documents that were months old and no longer part of the discussion. But of course Obama is pure evil even when he’s trying to cut emissions or rid the world of nuclear weapons, so we should all cheer the fact that the Chinese tried to game him. Yippeeeee!

Honduras Coup, Act VI, Day 22

It’s always interesting what one learns from reading what one’s opponents put before one. A defender of the dictatorship put forward a State Department report from February 2009 on human rights in Honduras. The writing is awful, such that one cannot make any comparisons between time periods to get a sense of what is happening in terms of violence. But one sentence in particular was of interest:

In the run-up to the November 30 primary elections, there were several politically motivated killings, which analysts interpreted as a “message” from organized crime for the Liberal Party and President Zelaya in particular to stop maneuvering to remain in power.

This implies that the dictatorship and organized crime in some degree coincide. That would not surprise me in the slightest, since the methods used against Zelaya are those of criminals.

Channel 36: The taxi drivers are on strike, demanding their bonus. They argue that they are more deserving than anyone because they are poor. The teachers are also demanding to be paid.
________________________________
Update:
Pretend Minister of Finance, Gabriela Nunez, says that the dictatorship has three months of monetary reserves (roughly $100M), so there’s no need to devalue. Reserves have fallen 20%.

Colombian paramilitaries from the AUC were used in Honduras. Nice guys:

Dole Food Company and Chiquita Brands International paid a Colombian terrorist organization to perform protection services that included murdering trade unionists, demobilized paramilitary José Gregorio Mongones said in an affidavit released December 6.

The testimony is the centerpiece of two civil lawsuits against Chiquita and Dole filed by family members of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. Both lawsuits accuse the companies of funding the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (Colombian United Self-Defense Units, or AUC), the country’s largest paramilitary organization, formally demobilized in 2006.

Radio Globo. Rafael Alegria. Demo on the 7th, supporting ALBA and human rights. The dictatorship is planning to not pay back money they received from ALBA.

Lisa Sullivan, SOAW:

The shy and serious faces of sustenance fishermen and farmers slowly opened up as we asked them to share their stories of recent months and days. There was one word that was repeated by every single one of them, old and young, men and women: fear.

Most of those present had been put on a list of resistance leaders, created by local mayors on orders of the coup regime. They had been targeted after walking 6 days into the capital to greet President Manuel Zelaya who was trying to re-enter the country. Zelaya had promised these communities that they would be given titles to the lands. Outside investors were claiming the rights to these lands that had birthed generations of their ancestors, but whose stunning views of mountains and seas made them desirable as sites of future resorts. They openly wondered if one of the reasons for the coup was the fact that Zelaya was overthrown was the fact that he had consistently defended the interests of poor farmers and fishermen over those of the corrupt elites who had ruled this small nation for centuries.

Since appearing on “the list” police have been entering their homes, demanding knowledge of their whereabouts from their families, following them to fields and fishing posts. One fisherman after another shared how they were not sleeping in their homes, how they feared leaving their wives and children alone as they tended to fishing traps, how they wondered if they would be the next ones to be found in a field and without life.

Reason Versus Emotion: HCR

A funny thing about the persons who back the “any HCR bill’s better than no HCR bill” concept is that many of them are pushing the meme that those who want to kill the Senate bill are doing it out of sheer emotion-laden spite, when they’re the ones losing their Pooh over it.

Case in point: Nate Silver’s increasingly bizarre and histrionics-fraught responses to Jon Walker, as detailed here.