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	Towards the People’s Summit at Rio+20: Civil Society Alternatives by Non-Government Liaison Service (UN-NGLS)   Mar 2012   Towards the People’s Summit at Rio+20: Civil Society Alternatives to the current Rio+20 Zero Draft Agenda.   This event brought together players involved in the People’s Summit, a parallel process to Rio+20 organized by civil society that will take place in Rio de Janeiro. Three members of the Brazilian Civil Society Facilitating Committee for Rio+20, along with representatives from participant civil society organizations (La Via Campesina and IBON International), shared their views on the Rio+20 informal negotiations, articulated goals for the conference, and formulated strategies to include human rights in discussions at Rio and beyond.   NGLS’s Hamish Jenkins, who served as moderator, provided an overview of the People’s Summit, and described the goals of Rio 1992 as sidelined by a pervasive political agenda driven by corporate, financial interests.   The challenges of the confluence of global crisis (food, financial, climate change), sometimes referred to as a “Crisis of Civilization,” need to be addressed at Rio+20 and in its outcome document.   Mr. Jenkins underlined that political mobilization must up the ante regarding power relations between governments and civil society. The critique of the current approach needs to be better understood and bolder alternatives articulated as we prepare for Rio+20.   Iara Pietricovsky de Oliveira of the Instituto de Estudios Socioeconomicos and the Brazilian Civil Society Facilitating Committee outlined the People’s Summit as originating from the World Social Forum events. The organizers of the People’s Summit do not support the current model of capitalism and its model of development.   Ms. Pietricovsky said that the current Rio+20 Zero Draft document reflects governments’ lack of commitment at a time of global crisis. The People’s Summit, as a parallel process, aims to provide a grassroots people centred strategy to offer alternative messages to governments, corporations, and other players.   Ms. Pietricovsky views the current conception of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as risking the human rights framework and reducing the capacity to defend national processes. Her group is working towards a strengthened multilateral system and a democratic, transparent UN framework with guaranteed participation of civil society groups and social movements.   The overarching context of this view, according to Ms. Pietricovsky, is a global movement for social and environmental justice, opposed to unregulated capitalism, commercialization of the commons, and the commodification of land and water.   Another member of the Brazilian Civil Society Facilitating Committee for Rio+20, André Abreu, described the focus of their Committee as creating public space for debating the "green economy", to make it accountable and transparent with the involvement of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), unions, workers, and other social movements.   In his view, the concept odf the Rio+20 Summit has been captured by corporations and private groups to promote their economic agenda and profit, while a better incarnation would favour local, small-scale solutions and democratic discussion.   Additionally, Mr. Abreu voiced further concerns about speculation on and financialization of the commons, including land grabs and water privatization, he views the current Zero Draft as neglecting issues of rights, democracy, and a just multilateral system.   Joining in Mr. Abreu’s criticism of the Zero Draft negotiations, Dena Hoff of La Via Campesina criticized its lack of distinction between industrial monoculture and small peasant agriculture, which ignores the fact that it is predominantly large-scale industrial agriculture and food industry that contribute 44-57% of global greenhouse gases.   Ms. Hoff stated that small peasant agriculture has always been the green economy, as it provides sustainable solutions to feeding people.   Transforming peasant agriculture to be an integral part of food system does not address causes of poverty and degradation worldwide, or discuss fair pricing, domestic market priority, or the role of rural communities in building sustainable community.   The system is biased against local food production/consumption, she concluded, advocating for the need to hold international agencies accountable in voicing the concerns of small-holder farmers, like those represented by La Via Campesina, who lack access to international fora like the United Nations.   Paul Quintos of the IBON Foundation stated that the Zero Draft negotiations display a systematic attempt by some powerful States to weaken, bracket, or delete nearly all references to human rights obligations and equity principles, including principles agreed upon in Rio 1992 such as the precautionary principle and the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities.   This trend, which Mr. Quintos said negates the integration of the three pillars of sustainable development.   In their avoidance of defining the "green economy", States leave open the possibility of promoting biofuels, nuclear energy, the financialization of natural resources, geoengineering, as capital seeks new sources of profit through creating new markets, investment outputs, and sources of raw materials.   The human rights framework and financial regulation, Mr. Quintos continued, can help to prevent privatization and speculation; the People’s Summit will provide the space necessary to openly discuss the fundamental underpinnings of the global economic and political order, and to embrace new paradigms, alternatives, and truly transformative solutions.   Representing the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Catarina Silveira emphasized the need to incorporate the workers’ rights agenda, including social protection, into the environmental agenda.   Given the ongoing global crisis of the labour market, an opportunity exists to indicate where jobs could be created and workers’ rights could be increased. The issue of a social protection floor is a particular demand of Ms. Silveira’s organization; she condemned the refusal of some countries to guarantee this in the Zero Draft.   Additionally, the Zero Draft lacks any mention of the means of payment for the transition, as governments are encouraging private sector leadership; she concluded by emphasizing the importance of a Financial Transactions Tax.   Finally, Barbara Adams spoke on behalf of Social Watch, raising concerns about the proposed plans for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as they run the risk, as the MDGs before them, of narrowing the development agenda and defining a wide range of issues simply in terms of lack of funds. Additionally, the SDGs could pose actual harm by promoting the financialization of water, rather than protecting rights in the context of planetary/ecological limits.   Ms. Adams framed the SDGs as placing the political burden of adjustment to climate change on the most vulnerable populations by emphasizing resilience, rather than redressing those issues through a rights-based approach.   She raised the proposal for alternative, consumption-driven goals, to combat overconsumption and mal-production, and concluded by focusing on the human rights agenda and the potential dangers posed to it by the Zero Draft and Rio+20. Visit the related web page
	One nation, under the gun by Jill Lepore The New Yorker   Apr 2012   There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.   The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five..   Gun owners may be more supportive of gun-safety regulations than is the leadership of the N.R.A. According to a 2009 Luntz poll, for instance, requiring mandatory background checks on all purchasers at gun shows is favored not only by eighty-five per cent of gun owners who are not members of the N.R.A. but also by sixty-nine per cent of gun owners who are..   One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.   In an average year, roughly a hundred thousand Americans are killed or wounded with guns. Visit the related web page
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