Obama has just this week met with three small business owners in Seattle, Washington, and reflecting that “Small Businesses Are the Backbone of Our Economy and the Cornerstones of Our Communities”.  He is trying to get Senate support for a bill that would increase the availability of credit for small businesses, and provide tax incentives for small business job creation.

Funnily enough this comes as I am in the middle of my ‘Smart Business’ listening tour of the country; I was in Waitakere Eco-City last week, Nelson tomorrow, and Dunedin on Thursday 2^nd September.

It is great to see the American leadership actively supporting the small business sector, and we will be doing our best to encourage a similar level of awareness and political support for our small business sector.

Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/17/small-businesses-are-backbone-our-economy-and-cornerstones-our-communities

The Obama initiative will support two projects covering about 1000 hectares and using parabolic trough technology to generate electric power that will feed into the US or state grid.

This is of course great news for the global economy.  Following Bush Jr, the Obama Administration is developing a fresh new approach to switching to a low-carbon economy.  Only last year China eclipsed the US in clean energy investment, mainly in wind and solar, so the US is still in catch-up mode.

The scale of activity undertaken by China and the US is enormous, and New Zealand is of course in a different league.  And the amount of solar radiation is variable in our country and so subsidized solar thermal energy plants of the large-scale kind being developed elsewhere (China, US, Spain) may not be installed here.  Of course, if the technology improves, nothing is impossible.

But where more progress can, and should, be made is in small-scale water and space-heating.  Private homes and office buildings can easily be decked out with photovoltaic roof panels for water-heating.  At present less than 2% of Kiwi homes have solar water-heating systems but this is growing fast.  I have had one for water installed in our home in recent months (along with passive solar floors and stairs). I hope to add to this with more panels for grid-contribution before long.  If every home had a 3 kW panel array, this would generate enough power for a quarter of our residential electricity needs.

The Green Party Policy favours incentives for micro-solar power:

1. Government tendering to install 500, 000 sq. m. of solar water heating panels (sufficient to supply about 125,000 homes). The programme will be:
2. Requiring that solar water heating, or other technologies giving equivalent performance such as heat pumps or wood-fired wetbacks, be installed in all new houses, hotels, motels, and residential institutions;
3. District plans providing for solar access to roofs and north walls to facilitate solar energy;
4. Increasing the amount that can be borrowed for solar water heater or solar design features;
5. Providing education, training and promotion for the sustainability requirements that encourage passive solar design in the new Building Act, including retraining for architects and builders and information targeted at people buying new homes.

I recall the Solar Industries Association submitting a few years ago to a parliamentary committee, advocating tax credits for solar installation.  We support this approach, as well.

But, as I said on Morning Report today, the over-riding need is to introduce a carbon price across-the-board for the economy as a whole – at a higher level than the pallid NZ$12.50 struck by Key’s Government in its moderated ETS.  Something around $30-50 per tonne, phased in rapidly, with compensatory redistributive benefits to the economically vulnerable, is the only way that the switch to a low-carbon NZ economy can be made in time.

Once that is done, the switch to renewables – hydro, wind, solar, tidal – will naturally arrange itself.

Hasten the day.

No other NATO country has stomach for the future there, and certainly not Britain with five fewer soldiers this week.

The UN is reduced to a cipher that acknowledges through Security Council resolutions what NATO decides to do, which is what Washington decides to do.  We witness unilateral hegemony masked in regional alliance diplomacy masked in an illusion of global legitimacy.  Everybody’s nightmare.  Especially the Afghanis.

The Afghanistan intervention began in the name of self-defence, post-9/11.  That was the first mistake – by the UN.  Terrorism has to be seen as an international crime, for an effective jurisdictional reach.  It is not a matter of war between states, even if you are harbouring them.

Issuing the Manichean ultimatum of ‘for or against’ us in the ill-described ‘war on terror’ was the second mistake – by the US.  Getting sucked into that false choice was the third – by New Zealand.

In ’01, the Taliban were an extremist regime, unrecognized at the UN.  They should have, could have, been handled differently, through tough sanctions that would have eventually brought them around or down, as happened with others (Rhodesia, Libya).  Inter-state invasions and air-strikes on wedding celebrants tend to glorify the extremists.  The diplomatic battle lines harden along with the military, to the point of sclerosis.

Now the situation is redolent of Vietnam, with the West, not the UN, fighting an extremist regime of a fundamentally different culture.  There is no win-win to these, not in the Middle East, not in South Asia.  The Viet Cong are today’s Taliban.  The Vietnamese won, then stabilized, then reconciled, then became a respected member of the international community.  The US lost, then stabilized, then reconciled, yet fails to learn the searing lessons of global leadership.

The US claims, with continually less conviction and credibility, that the conflict in Afghanistan is about self-defence.  If it is US self-defence, let them state it clearly and fight it alone.  If it is NATO self-defence, the same goes.  If it is the self-defence of the West, how do we prove that New Zealand is threatened by the Taliban?

I do not feel threatened by the Taliban.  I find some of their policies odious.  That is not the basis for self-defence.  Al Qaeda is different.  They are a terrorist organization and should be subject to criminal jurisdiction.  But you need to separate the two out.  The previous US administration policy of deliberately conflating them has sown an impenetrable policy thicket from which it is not easy to emerge.

Afghanistan is no longer about self-defence, it is about nation-building.  You do not do nation-building from Washington.  You do it from New York– through genuine plans drawn up by the Secretariat and put forward to the Security Council.  You do not receive reports from NATO.  The only non-UN official inside the UN Secretariat building is a NATO liaison officer.

Until the West agrees to an equal input into Security Council policy-making by China and Russia, the strategic skew will always undermine crisis management and nation-building.

The counter-terrorism operation in Afghanistan never had a sound legal basis.  Now OEF has been conflated into ISAF, the stabilization force.  While that force is legal, it has lost its political credibility, because the premise on which it rests (legitimate representative government) has collapsed.  Time the Security Council terminated its mandate.

The NZ-SAS, having been attacked already, stand to be attacked again.  Our troops are capable and tough.  All the more reason to make sure they are legal and properly deployed.  They are there, we’re told, to prove we can play our part.  But in what?

Are we confined simply to numerical additionality of vanishingly modest proportion, or are we capable of thinking for ourselves?  We tend to lump our SAS in with the All Blacks.  The SAS is different.  If you fight and kill, you must make sure it is legal and it is politically wise.  Karzai’s Afghanistan is neither, with or without Abdullah.

It is time to bring the SAS home.

Dr. Kennedy Graham, MP,

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

Wellington

Open Letter to President Barack Obama

Dear Mr President,

Congratulations on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.  Many around the world will welcome the award and be inspired by the tribute accorded to you.  

The Prize, no doubt, reflects equally your achievements for peace in attaining the presidency itself as much as those recorded during the fleeting presidential period before closure of nominations.  It is not my purpose to over-rate your achievements to date or to query whether they are sufficient to have earned the high accolade that has been given to you.  The Nobel Committee members will be confident that they know what they are doing.

My purpose in writing is rather to consider the new political situation you are now in, and in some ways the new challenges you face, as a result of having been awarded the Prize.  For from now on, the peoples of the world will perceive you in a new light, with heightened expectations.  Those perceptions will reflect a daunting multiplicity of beliefs, apprehensions and hopes.  In a sense, the Prize has upped the ante for you in your strategic policy-making for the remainder of at least your first presidential term.

It seems there are two central challenges for you to address, as national commander-in-chief and now global peacemaker-in-chief.  One is the continuing existence of nuclear weapons in the world.  The other is the legitimising of the use of force for global governance.  The two are closely related, and you are at the centre of their vortex.

Your ringing, if carefully-crafted, declaratory rhetoric about creating the conditions for a nuclear-free world will come across to all as highly welcome.  How to translate that into practical initiative is less easy.  But the options do exist. 

They do not lie in tinkering at the margin with vertical non-proliferation measures such as, for example, test bans, fissile material cut-offs, or seeking ratification of the South Pacific Nuclear-free Zone’s Protocol, as important as those might be.  Nor do they even lie in greater assertiveness towards the horizontal non-proliferation regime, such as curtailing Iran and North Korea, India and Pakistan and, if we may dare mention it, Israel.  These are critical issues but they are not at the epicentre of the nuclear dilemma.  The dilemma is, actually, your country.  For yours is the leader – both politically and militarily.

The option lies in addressing the central reliance of the US itself on nuclear deterrence, both in force posture and doctrinal tenets.  For nuclear deterrence has, for over half a century, underpinned what passes for strategic stability, and it has been the US that has led the trend.  It is the US that first acquired the weapon, the US that offered to place it under international control, and when that extraordinarily visionary initiative failed, it is the US that has led the nuclear arms race.  And even today, it is the US (followed by the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council) that steadfastly refuses to lessen its reliance on nuclear weapons and deterrence theory.

To reduce the numerical surplus of nuclear weapons, from some 20,000 in the national arsenal to some 5,000 is laudable, but it does not confront the central challenge – which is to cross the threshold of minimal deterrence.  Russia and the others will follow, but the lead can only come from the US. 

In the 1980s, some countries used to propose a 20-year phase-out programme for a nuclear-free world.  The US and other major powers ignored the plan as if it did not exist.  Today, a refashioned and improved version lies before the UN – a nuclear weapons convention which would result in a nuclear-free world by 2030. 

Total bans have been put in place for chemical and biological weapons.  But unlike those weapons, the nuclear military machine is central to the global power configuration.  It will take huge political skill and courage – of the kind only that wins Nobel Peace Prizes – to lead the world through the psychological nuclear deterrence barrier, and towards a nuclear-free world that such a convention offers.

To get there requires equal courage on the other front – the use of force – because they are intimately related.  For the United Nations, as with the League of Nations before it, rested global stability on the idea of collective security using conventional weapons.  It is one of history’s greater ironies that a month after the ink on the UN Charter was dry, the world moved from the conventional to the nuclear age.

There are those who say that nuclear deterrence makes the world safe.  There are those who say the price is too high, through the risk of failure. Until the world agrees that global stability can be secured through conventional weapons again, with nuclear weapons either absent, or on a near-deployment status, or at least off high-alert, then we shall never be able to attain a nuclear-free world.

So the twin challenge is to wean the US, and the world, off nuclear deterrence and replace it with a credible alternative means of securing global governance through conventional weaponry. 

That brings us to the Afghanistan crisis.  For it is the litmus test of all of the above.

Your electoral success in exiting Iraq through re-focusing on counter-terrorism in Afghanistan was politically astute.  Yet in politics every solution bequeaths the next problem and, as you know well, Afghanistan could doom your presidency if it is not satisfactorily handled within your first term.  The Nobel Prize places you with excruciating precision between a rock and a hard place.  A troop surge will make the Prize twist hypocritically in the wind.  A rapid exit will produce a Republican presidential challenger to ‘save America from a weak dreamer whose Nobel Prize went to his head’.  You go down either road, now, at your political peril.

There is a third option.  It is to return to a genuine multilateralism at the United Nations – of the kind that the United States envisioned when it created the system in the 1940s.  Your records will show that defence officials reported to the US Congress in the mid-‘40s that it could provide a conventional military force in support of the UN.

Mr President, go back to the Security Council, once more in person, and refer the situation of Afghanistan to Member States for a genuine deliberation.  Not as in a US lead that has been worked out within the State Dept. the week before, calibrated in London and Paris, then cajoled through Moscow and Beijing before being imposed on the elected ten.  I mean refer Afghanistan to the UN, without a preconceived American solution.  Leave it to a Security Council committee to emerge with a proposal.

At the same time, reiterate US military support for a UN-led (not US-led) mission.  Only then will the conflict that has become a civil war in that country be handled in an objective manner, and nation-building become an authentic undertaking.  Only then will Taliban engage in dialogue.

Only then, when the UN is given a chance to function as an effective multilateral agency, not one brought to its knees by the US and major power rivalry; only then, will you have the twin opportunity of leading towards a world that does not have to rely on nuclear deterrence but can govern itself well.  Ditch the regional nuclear defence alliance system that is intoxicatingly addictive and hideously dangerous at the same time.  Adopt a global conventional collective security system that can evolve to something more sane, and civilised.

It is one almighty punt.  But the Nobel Prize gives you little choice, now.  And you are probably the only person, with the right skills and vision, in the right place at the right time, to be able historically to pull it off.  If you do not, probably no-one ever will.

With sincere respect,

Dr. Kennedy Graham, MP

“New Zealand is at serious risk of becoming an international Pariah over climate, and jeopardising its international standing and trade relations. The last thing we want is to become the equivalent of the French Government during nuclear testing in the Pacific.”

Yeap, it seems after years of carping about the importance of relations with the United States, Act’s climate denial stance and demands for a select committee to investigate whether the earth really does revolve around the sun will be moving us in exactly the opposite direction to closer friendship with the United States.

This warning follows a speech by American President-Elect, Barack Obama, to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Global Climate Summit to which Obama pledges sweeping action to combat climate change but notes that the United States cannot meet the challenge alone:

Now’s the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high…

Anyone that is willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States.

So, Rodney Hide, How about it?  Can you put aside the denialism, if not for science at least so we can stay cuddling up to that country with all the big shiny nuclear weapons?

This segues rather obliquely on to the topic of Barack Obama. You’ll remember that last month I noted that Michael Pollan was calling on Obama to give political thought and action towards food, and as an immediate first step send a message to the people of America by growing his own food on the White House lawn. I argued that such a vege garden could work here at Parliament too.  Well, it turns out that Obama HAS been reading and digesting Pollan’s work:

There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

So, how about that, John Key?  I can tell you’ve been busy over the last few days, what with the increasingly bizarre positioning statements from Rodney Hide and all to deal with.  But have you had time to brush up on food policy by reading a little bit of Pollan like Obama has? I’m expecting my new office window should have a great view of the lawn the front of the Beehive where you could grow a mighty fine crop of spuds, rhubarb and carrots.

Before long we will know whether Barack Obama meant it – when he said that, whatever the financial traumas, a national surge to equip America with home-grown, green sources of energy was his number one economic priority.

Even as the votes were being cast, some said going green would have to wait. But the president-elect has been saying it has to be done now: for the planet, for American energy security – and for the good of an economy that badly needs government investment to kick start growth. Green jobs for a green economy…

In the context of our own election it defines the worldwide movement that we can either choose to be a part of or be left behind.

The big story for little Aotearoa, is what this means for trade.  And Obama has been equivocal.  But occasionally he says things that can give us hope that for the first time in a generation at least US trade policy will be based on ethics rather than either protectionism or exploitation of other countries:

“It is absolutely critical that we engage in trade, but it has to be viewed not just through the lens of Wall Street, but also Main Street, which means we’ve got strong labor standards and strong environmental standards and safety standards, so we don’t have toys being shipped in the US with lead paint on them. There are also opportunities in our economy around creating a green economy. We send $1 billion to foreign countries every day because of our addiction to foreign oil. For us to move rapidly to cap greenhouse gases, generate billions of dollars that we can reinvest in solar and wind and biodiesel that can put people back to work.”

That sounds like the framework for the type of international trade that the Greens could work with, rather than the current model that promotes unsustainable growth, destruction of local diversity and self sufficiency and a race to the bottom on labour and environmental standards.

This report by UN World Opinion Forum correspondent, Kevin Sanders updates and expands an earlier program on the failure of the last Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the UN in 2005, when the Bush Administration blocked discussion of earlier agreements on nuclear disarmament. The next NPT Review will not be until 2010.Then-Secretary-General of the UN Kofi Annan called the failure “a real disgrace.”

Meanwhile Russel thinks he’s a bit of an Usain Bolt.  I can see that:

Nice smiles, nice shoes, nice islands (Waiheke and Jamaica).

Photo Credit: Rich115

So here’s a discussion point the cartoon raises: which set has more in common – the Labour and National parties, or Barack Obama and John McCain? I reckon MMP has an influence allowing the centre parties to gravitate closer together without facing such strong pressures from external parties that would otherwise be internal factions.  (Although it seems clear that National and especially Labour politicians are uncomfortable with many of the centrist positions they end up taking for expediency reasons.)  However, the US does appear from the outside to have a very redoubtable and inflexible political landscape at the federal level.

Hat tip: Kakariki

The biggest factor that doomed Clinton, from day one, was Iraq. Her vote for the war and subsequent lack of apology cost her the support of a huge segment of the party that flocked to Obama (and, early on, Edwards) and tarnished her brand from the very beginning…

Obama was able to convincingly argue, “When I’m your nominee, my opponent won’t be able to say that I supported this war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran.

The rest of the world’s view of the US election is often skewed by the importance we place on foreign policy compared to Americans’ obvious emphasis on domestic policy. So it is fascinating to read that a principled stand against war could have played a key role in Obama’s seemly unassailable lead in the democratic primary.

I like to think it is an endorsement for politicians taking a stand based on firmly held principles, rather than triangulating their way towards the middle ground. At the time Obama became famous for opposing the war it was still a risky political position, but it was the right one. Others who took the same stand were squashed under the criticism. It will be interesting to see if the same momentum for peace continues when the election become a true presidential election rather than just a democratic primary.

None of those three are anywhere close to the US$2,649,725 in declared donations that George Bush received in 2004.  So I guess there is still a bit more money yet to make its way from the pipelines into the campaign coffers.  Either that or Bush must have had a special relationship with those in the corporate levels of the oil business?

In New Zealand there are no records one way or the other as to how much oil companies might have donated secretly during the 2005 election to trusts like the Waitamata Trust.