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But the public statements issued by the EU, the European Commission and Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain a number of curious omissions. �Plan Colombia� is mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are the atrocities committed by the army and coordinated by the state. The killings in the country are blamed solely upon paramilitaries and guerillas.

Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features missing from the European statements. The first is that the funding package is not a European initiative, but was provided at the request of the Colombian government. The second is that it will be supplemented by extra money from the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, the US Under Secretary of State, was sitting in the meeting. Trawl the European Commission�s archive, and you discover a further interesting feature: that the �peace process� to which the EU was referring is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the plan�s �social component�, attached to the US invasion in the hope of making it look like something rather different. Spain is prepared to go further still, and help the United States to finance the Colombian army.

The new European funding, in other words, provides the political credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. Wittingly or otherwise, the European Union has helped the two governments to disguise a programme of state terror as humanitarian aid.

Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a financial solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights, least of all from a scheme that�s responsible for their abuse. The only help foreign intervention can offer the Colombian people is intense diplomatic pressure, exposing the atrocities of their government and army, denouncing the scheme which coordinates them and isolating its supporters. Instead, we have chosen to collaborate.

At its best, the EU�s funding is a waste of money. At its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity. How many of us would have agreed that our money should be used like this?

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Sustainability: The Crisis of the Paradigm

John McMurtry

Although �sustainability� has long been the touchstone category for those with an eye for world survival, it hasn�t much dinted the minds of those who can�t think beyond maximising money sequences for the rich.1 The life-ground does not yet compute to the ruling program.

But there is a problem of comprehending �sustainability� itself. The celebrated Brundtland Report badly misleads us here. It identifies nothing to be sustained except the monetised economy. Everything else is presupposed as having value only as �resources� to sustain the imperative of economic growth.2 If we examine the Report carefully, we find a hard truth. �Sustainability� means only ensuring there are enough resources to carry on as pollution sinks, priceable extractables from forests and oceans, and whatever else can be extractedfrom Nature or used to deposit wastes in multiplying industrial outputs.3

Industrial Growth vs.Life Sustainability

The Brundtland Report is, in fact, confined within the ever more evidently failing economic paradigm that is destroying planet earth. Typical of the school that conceives monetised �growth� as a panacea rather than a deadly assumption, its authors proclaim that the future requires a �five-to-ten-fold increase in world industrial output� (p. 276). Brundtland is an economist, and so cannot recognise any value than what is priced and sells for a profit. �Sustainable� therefore does not mean sustainable biodiversity, or surviving habitats for natural life, or any natural ecosystem left for the future at all. It means only the sustainability of instrumental resources to go on outputting maximal monetised �growth� - �until population stability is achieved�.

As to why demand will stabilise with population, the Report has no answer -although the assumption contradicts another premise

of neo-classical economics, which is that society�s aggregate demand is unlimited in principle. The blindness of the received economic paradigm remains systemic. There is no �environmental economics� taught in the academy which gets beyond this deadend calculus.

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