Category Archives: Essays

International Organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank lack political and legal accountability. These supranational organizations are immune from any US federal, state or other national jurisdicitons, regardless of where they are headquartered. Furthermore, they generally lack political accountability. Although the country representatives in say the UN or the WTO are appointed by national executives (like the process for ministers), there is really no transparency or electoral feedback that evaluates these representatives and the organizations’ good governance. Worse, the IMF and World Bank chiefs are named by the EU and the United States respectively, thus alienating the rest of the world. At least the WTO (generally the most criticized of these organizations) allows each member state to have equal voting power.

In the US, the UN is continuously criticized for this lack of accountability and henceforth encrouching on US sovereignty. On the other hand, in Europe the UN is often hailed as the panacea for the world’s ills. Both are mislead. The US is wrong in that it is holding onto to sovereignty at a time in history where the trend is to yeild a degree of it for the better good of the entire globe. The EU is innocent in thinking that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s be honest, a non-transparent, non-accountable international organization is nothing more than the sum of all of the corruption in each of its member states. What is needed is serious UN reform, something that is extremely difficult to achieve for it would mean that certain fat cats (such as France, the US, and Russia would lose their relative weight and veto power).

All in all what concerns me the most . . . Continue reading →

I remember from back in my days as an environmental attorney when I used to work on water pollution that a huge percentage of water pollution is directly the fault of average people, not waste water treatment plants or big industry. Just by the fact that we exist, eat, drink, consume, and produce waste (both natural and synthetic), we cause damage to the environment. As a matter of fact, seemingly natural and organic substances (such as nutrients) are also pollutants, especially when they are entered into an ecosystem in quantities above their sustainable levels.

In any event, here is an article fromt the Associated Press about how levels of certain ingredients from the most popular holiday treats have been found in the Puget Sound:

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Here is an insightful article by Robert Fisk on France’s historic and present interests in Lebanon. Anyone interested should also check out the scene in the film “West Beirut” where at a French high school in Beirut, a student is told by his teacher that it was the French who gave Lebanon its nation and freedom.

A French colonial legacy of despair: They wanted Lebanon’s ‘independence’ – but they wanted it in France’s favour; by Robert Fisk:

I couldn’t help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George’s Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered industry minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will – will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days? – try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.

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You question why it is so difficult to combat the spread of HIV in the developed world? I just read this in the Global Development Briefing:

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