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COLUMN SEVENTY-FOUR, AUGUST 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)

FROM PORTSIDE
Portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a
news, discussion and debate service of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It
says it aims to provide varied material of interest to people
on the Left. Heretofore , we were  under the impression that Portside  is the Internet's voice of the Left.  But it turns out to be the Internet's voice of the fundamentalist Far-Left, which, like all fundamentalist organizations, adheres to an orthodoxy and consequently refuses to post dissident or differing opinions from within the Left---such as HATE YOUR GOVERNMENT BUT LOVE YOUR COUNTRY, available to be read in SECTION ONE of COLUMN SEVENTY.  Fundamentalists, like fascists, will not tolerate any disagreements or variations from the fundamentalist orthodoxy.

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DUMB DUMBYA BLOCKS PLAN TO SAVE MILLIONS OF LIVES

From - Sat Jun 15 13:26:46 2002
To: ps <portside@yahoogroups.com>
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 20:09:58 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Bush blocks bid to save millions of lives

Bush Blocks Bid to Save Millions of Lives

By Geoffrey Lean

June 2, 2002, The lndependent/UK

European governments have long suspected it. Environmentalists have long proclaimed it. But now there is clear evidence that President George Bush's environmental policy is indeed a load of crap.

For the United States is blocking an international plan to halve the number of people, two-fifths of the population of the planet, who have no sanitation. Some 2.4 billion people lack even a bucket for their wastes, and this is one of the main causes of world disease.

European and developing nations, meeting in Bali, Indonesia, want the world's leaders to agree to meet this target by 2015. They are proposing that the plan be put in front of the leaders when they meet for a new "Earth Summit" in Johannesburg in August.

The summit - officially called the World Summit for Sustainable Development - is to concentrate on the environmental problems faced by the world's poorest people. The Bali meeting, which is the final preparatory conference for the summit, is running into trouble, with the Bush administration, in the words of one top Whitehall source, being "very, very negative".

More than 2.2 million people - mainly children " die in the Third World every year from diseases caused by lack of sanitation and by dirty drinking water. The United Nations says that "the incidence of some illnesses and death could drop by as much as 75 per cent" if adequate clean water and sanitation were provided.

Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, who is leading Britain's delegation to Bali, describes dealing with this issue as "absolutely key to any prospect of tackling poverty".

The US position is baffling the other countries at the conference because the Bush administration has already agreed a target of halving the number of people without clean drinking water by the same date " and this is seen as inseparable from solving the problem of sanitation. The British officials held a special meeting with the American delegation on Thursday, but did not receive any clear reason for their objection to the plan.

The clash over sanitation is only one of a range of issues holding up an agreement on a plan of action to present to the summit. OPEC countries are opposing a plan - originating from an initiative by Tony Blair - to halve the number of people, currently two billion, without any modern sources of energy, mainly by tapping into renewable sources. And the US, Canada, Japan and Australia are objecting to European proposals to make energy consumption in developed countries more environmentally friendly.

Senior British ministers fear that if the Bali conference fails to reach agreement it will be hard for the Johannesburg summit to succeed - and the best chance of tackling world poverty in two decades will be lost for the indefinite future.

" 2002 lndependent Digital (UK) Ltd  ##

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