Monday, November 11, 2019
Message From the DESMOG Editor
https://www.desmogblog.com/
Recently, legal shots have been fired en masse against the oil industry over climate change. As former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson took the stand in New York’s case against the oil giant, clues about how the industry will be defending itself amid this barrage are starting to appear.
Get the whole story from Dan Zegart, who was at the trial.
On the other side of the country, Sharon Kelly has the story on a new report showing fossil fuels might not be the lucrative investment some think. This report shows California and Colorado pension funds that invested in fossil fuels lost over $19 billion in the past decade.
Meanwhile, Justin Mikulka reports on the sunny outlook for renewable energy, coming from a surprising pair of sources that have long been skeptical of the potential for solar and wind power.
Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com.
Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director
Dalai Lama breaks the chains of reincarnation
Tibetan spiritual leader says
Buddhist tradition of reincarnated dalai lamas should end, echoing China’s
criticism of feudal successions
RICHARD S
EHRLICH, BANGKOK
In a surprise spiritual
reversal, the Dalai Lama said his Tibetan Buddhist tradition of reincarnated
dalai lamas “should end now” because the hierarchy created “a feudal system,” a
description echoing decades of communist China’s condemnation.
The Dalai Lama’s public
statement comes amid attempts by Beijing to control who can be legally
recognized as a reincarnated lama in Tibet and what laws they must obey.
“Institutions need to be owned
by the people, not by an individual,” the self-exiled 14th Dalai Lama said in a
speech at his residence in McLeod Ganj, a small town on the outskirts of
Dharamsala, India.
“Like my own institution, the
Dalai Lama’s office, I feel it is linked to a feudal system. In 1969, in one of
my official statements, I had mentioned that it should continue…but now I feel,
not necessarily.
“It should go. I feel it
should not be concentrated in a few people only,” he told college students from
Bhutan and India on October 25.
“The tradition should end now,
as reincarnation has some connection with the feudal system.
“There have been cases of
individual lamas who use reincarnation [for personal gains] but never pay
attention to study and wisdom,” he said, according to the Times of India.
The Dalai Lama, however, did
not express doubt about the concept of reincarnation. Buddhism claims all
people are reincarnated even if they are not Buddhists.
Meanwhile, on October 28, US
Ambassador for Religious Freedom Samuel Brownback and his delegation met the
Dalai Lama in McLeod Ganj.
“The US government supports
the Dalai Lama and supports for the succession of the Dalai Lama to be done by
the Tibetan Buddhist leadership,” Brownback said, criticizing China’s
interference in the procedure.
“The role of picking a
successor to the Dalai Lama belongs to the Tibetan Buddhist system, the Dalai
Lama, and other Tibetan leaders. It does not belong to anybody else, not any
government or any entity,” Brownback said.
Beijing swiftly responded to
the US ambassador’s remarks and visit.
“We strongly urge the US side
to stop any form of contact with the Dalai clique, stop making irresponsible
remarks, stop using Tibet-related issues to interfere in China’s internal
affairs, and do more to advance China-US mutual trust and cooperation,” China’s
foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang told reporters.
China eyes warily exiled
Tibetan populations, including large groups in neighboring India and Nepal,
numbering over 150,000 and 20,000 respectively.
During a visit to the Nepalese
capital Kathmandu in October, Chinese President Xi Jinping issued an ominous
warning, saying “Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country
will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.”
According to Indian and
Nepalese media reports, Xi sought to sign an extradition treaty that aimed to
deport all Tibetan refugees in Nepal back to China. Kathmandu, however,
declined to sign.
The current 14th Dalai Lama
fled his majestic Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet in 1959 along with 80,000
Tibetan refugees to escape invading communist Chinese troops. They secured
sanctuary in India’s Himalayas.
Since the 1950s, China has
repeatedly said Tibetan Buddhism and the institutional power of dalai lamas and
other senior clergy was one of the main reasons Tibetans lived in “feudal”
poverty, often treated as serfs by Tibetan officials, nobles and lamas.
Tibetan historians said the
centuries-old system of reincarnated dalai lamas, panchen lamas and other
clergy contributed to repression in Tibet, but Tibetans should have been
allowed to fix their homeland instead of submitting to anti-Buddhist Chinese.
“For centuries, Tibet was
ruled by feudal serfdom under theocracy,” China’s State Council Information
Office reiterated in March.
“Millions of serfs were
subjected to cruel exploitation and oppression until [China’s] democratic
reform in 1959,” it said in a report entitled Democratic Reform in Tibet, 60
Years On.
“Even as they were aware that
feudal serfdom under theocracy was coming to an end, the 14th Dalai Lama and
the reactionaries in Tibet’s upper class had no wish to conduct reform.
“Instead, they tried to
maintain the system for fear that reform would deprive them of their political
and religious privileges, together with their huge economic benefits,” the
report said, according to Beijing’s official Xinhua news agency.
Also beginning in the 1950s,
the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trained and financed Tibetan
guerrillas to conduct scattered assaults against China’s powerful People’s Liberation
Army.
The CIA secretly trained
ethnic Khampas and other Tibetans in Colorado state’s Rocky Mountains before
giving them supplies and parachuting them into Tibet.
The CIA manipulated that
small, bloody insurgency until 1972 when President Richard Nixon abruptly ended
US armed support and traveled to Beijing to improve ties with Chinese Chairman
Mao Zedong.
China’s communists destroyed
most of Tibet’s monasteries and shrines during the 1960s and 70s. Thousands of
Tibetans reportedly perished from persecution, economic disruption and other
policies.
The Dalai Lama repeatedly said
he is a Marxist and would accept autonomy for Tibet under China’s domination.
But Beijing suspects he is a “splittist” conspiring to achieve independence.
Buddhism arrived in Tibet from
India during the seventh century.
“Dalai Lama” is a Mongolian
title meaning “Ocean of Wisdom.” Followers also refer to him as, “His Holiness”
or “Wish-Fulfilling Gem.”
Dalai lamas and others senior
lamas are revered even though they have not achieved the spiritual
enlightenment and nirvana of a Buddha.
Instead they are described as
incarnations of Avalokitesvara the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who delays
achieving nirvana to altruistically help others.
The first dalai lama was born
in 1390. Tibetan Buddhists believe this same person has been reincarnated 14
times.
The current Dalai Lama was
born on July 6, 1935 shortly after the 13th died. Two years later, a delegation
of high lamas searched Tibet for the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation and conducted
traditional tests with several children born amid “prophetic signs.”
Clergymen selected an infant
named Lhamo Thondup. He picked out, from among various items, things which
belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama and performed other feats which they
interpreted as evidence of reincarnation.
Today, the 84-year-old Dalai
Lama appears jovial and spontaneous, frequently traveling abroad.
Governments Beware: People Are Rising Up All Over the World
NOV 07, 2019 OPINION | TD ORIGINALS
Lately there seem to be an
unusually large number of mass resistance movements unfolding in countries all
over the world. Here in the U.S., Puerto Rico’s recent
political turmoil upended the entire local government structure. In
Latin America, there have been upheavals over the past few weeks in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile.
In the Caribbean, Haiti is
experiencing its worst political turmoil since the 2004 ouster of President
Jean Bertrand Aristide. On the other side of the planet, Arab nations
like Iraq and Lebanon have
erupted into mass upheavals. Sudan just
a few months ago toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir and now wants his party
disbanded. And in Hong
Kong, months of mass sustained protests have brought the nation to a
standstill. What is happening?
There are common themes
running throughout this widespread global uprising. The unrest is marked by a
deep dissatisfaction with an economic order that benefits elites over others,
combined with outrage against authoritarianism and the use of force to quell
dissent. Often these are intertwined, as regimes use force to maintain the
unequal economic order and demand public subservience and obedience. Then, a
new proposed rule or law— seemingly innocuous at first—lights the spark of
protest over long-simmering issues. In the internet age, activists organize
with greater ease than before and are highly educated about their plight,
giving them a greater ability to document and share abuses far and wide.
I spoke with three people to
try to understand the common threads of protest in Chile, Lebanon and Hong
Kong, and to explore why and how people have been rising up and organizing in
the face of inequality and repression. Mia Dragnic is a sociologist from Chile
and a doctoral candidate in Latin American studies at the University of Chile.
Dragnic considers herself a “feminist militant” and, in the midst of her
current tenure as a visiting scholar at University of California at San Diego,
she explained to me in an interview that
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera “has not attempted to dialogue with social
movements nor changed any of the type of structural factors that have given
rise to the current crisis.” Chileans rose up after the announcement of a hike
in subway fares, but as is often the case, their response to the fare hike
was symptomatic of a broader economic resentment. In fact, although Chile has
been lauded for being an economic miracle, it experiences the highest level of
inequality among OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) nations.
According to Dragnic, the
protesters “are demanding social rights because the Chilean state has
privatized those rights and converted itself into a guarantor of the rights of
the private sector.” Those “social rights,” she says, include “education,
health and housing.” Dragnic recently authored a statement titled “International
Community Against the Militarization of Chile,” which was signed by
thousands of academics, activists and others. The statement demands Piñera’s
resignation and denounces his militarized response to the protests. So far,
Piñera’s response has been to oust eight
ministers, but he has resolutely refused
to resign from his own position. Dragnic pointed out Piñera has
“handed power to a military general to handle the protests.” Many fear that
such a move is reminiscent of Chile’s violent
past, when the U.S. backed a brutal 1973 coup against the democratically
elected government of Salvador Allende and helped install the notorious
dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Across the world in
Lebanon, Prime
Minister Saad Hariri was more responsive to dissent than Chile’s
Piñera, resigning after just 13 days of sustained mass protests in cities all
over the country that included the formation of a human chain. As with the
subway fare incident in Chile, outrage among the Lebanese public was initially
triggered by the announcement of a tax on
the popular texting software WhatsApp, but it reflected a deeper economic
discontent.
I recently spoke with Jackson
Allers. In our interview,
Allers explained to me that Lebanese people are fed up with their government
because “the infrastructure has crumbled, [and] the currency, which is
artificially pegged to the U.S. dollar, is in absolute disarray right now, and
it mirrors what’s happened around the Arab world since 2012.” Allers was
referring to the Arab
Spring movements in many Middle Eastern nations that comprised a wave
of pro-democracy movements demanding democratic reforms. “The final straw was
on Oct. 17,” said Allers, “[which] was when the government imposed a tax on
WhatsApp phone calls.”
Allers pointed out Lebanon’s
crisis was centered on the failures of capitalism, calling the country “a
perfect example of a free-market state,” and “crony capitalism gone rampant.”
One of the positive hallmarks of this mass movement — unlike previous eras of
dissent in Lebanon — is the cross-sectarian nature of protesters. People from
nearly every socioeconomic, political and religious sector are joining
together. They say Hariri’s resignation is not enough and want to see an
overturning of the entire corrupt system.
Elsewhere on the globe, in
Hong Kong, which has occupied international headlines for
many months now, protesters are also sustaining their activism for the long
haul. Although the protests were initially triggered by a controversial
extradition plan with China, they are now a response to broader issues of
control, authoritarianism and — just as is the case in many other sites of
dissent — the economy. Economic inequality in Hong Kong has increased
dramatically and is now the greatest it has been in 45
years.
A brutal
police response overseen by Chief Executive Carrie Lam has only
hardened the resolve of the largely youth-led and seemingly leaderless
movement. Joy Ming King is activist born and raised in Hong Kong and an
undergraduate student at Wesleyan University. In an interview,
he explained to me that activists marked an ongoing ban on face masks in the
public realm by donning masks en masse on Halloween while defying authorities. King,
who has been participating in the ongoing protests through organizing and
direct action both outside and inside Hong Kong through his work in the Lausan Collective,
explained that the creative action was an example of “collective enjoyment
and rejuvenation, a way to sustain the movement, and that Hong Kongers are
organizing largely through the use of digital technology in online forums and
without leaders directing most of the actions. The anger that residents feel
toward the government is aimed both at the local authorities and at China,
which through its special relationship with Hong Kong has attempted to exert
greater control over the semi-autonomous city.
The commonalities of why there
are so many movements in disparate parts of the world are quite striking.
Free-market capitalism has proved time and again to be a failure. The promised
riches are distributed far too unequally, and for most they never transpire.
The only way to preserve the current social and economic order is by force. And
when people have had enough, they meet force with resistance and resilience.
These are lessons not just for ordinary people suffering economic injustices,
but for the governments that oversee them.
Columnist
Sonali Kolhatkar is a
columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of
"Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on
Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV,…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)