Eric Holder’s War

23 02 2010

Eric Holder’s War,” The American Prospect, March 2010.

For the attorney general, remaking the rule of law in a new century is as personal as it is professional.

Hours before dawn on one of the last days of October 2009, the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan since 2001, Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, strode out of a C-17 cargo plane parked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Barack Obama, having reversed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover, trailed just behind. During the official military ceremony, the two friends stood in dark suits, silently saluting 18 servicemen, including three Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed by the Afghan War days prior. The aggrieved expressions on their faces were identical.

Holder’s presence was surprising. The attorney general has played only a minor role in the public debate over issues of war and peace. But as the president contemplates the legal and logistical puzzles bequeathed to him by George W. Bush — chiefly the management of what the administration no longer calls a “war on terror” — Holder has provided crucial, if understated, counsel and support.

As a Justice Department veteran in an administration elected on a message of change, Holder is both an insider and an outsider — a dual role to which he has grown accustomed in his decades of working in Washington. One of his first meetings as attorney general was with Janet Reno, his Democratic predecessor and former boss. Yet he has adopted an “in with the new” attitude, focusing on reversing Bush-era policies that gutted civil-rights protections, for example. Holder has also been forced to confront a set of legal questions relating to terrorism — including touchy jurisdictional negotiations with the Department of Defense and the relatively young Department of Homeland Security — that rarely crossed his desk in such high volume, or with as much urgency, in the Clinton days.

In an era where counterterrorism outstrips traditional law-enforcement activity in its ability to generate headlines, Holder must balance agency priorities. His long tenure in Washington has gifted him a certain bureaucratic agility — he was able to keep his department out of the messy public wrangling between the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel over the release of incriminating photos of detainees being abused. At other junctures, such as his controversial Black History Month speech about race relations in America, his lack of interest in Washington’s political politesse is evident.

Through it all, he has managed to maintain a close relationship with the president. For Holder and for Obama, both talented lawyers and torchbearers for black political power in America, remaking the rule of law in a new century is as personal as it is professional. This is a war they fight together.

***

The Obama-Holder partnership began in a dining room in upper Northwest Washington, D.C. In late 2004, Ann Walker Marchant, a media consultant and cousin of Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, hosted a dinner party to which she invited the young senator-elect and Holder, a 30-year veteran of the capital. Vernon Jordan, a former Bill Clinton adviser and Marchant’s uncle, has joked that “all black people that finish college know one another.” But the two Ivy League lawyers with immigrant fathers had never met. When Marchant seated the lanky basketball junkies next to one another, they discovered their now well-known biographical similarities — from attending Columbia University as undergraduates to slogging out years of public service while their wives served as the family breadwinners.

“I wasn’t setting anybody up on a date,” says Marchant, who had known the Obamas and the Holders separately for years. “But there was a connection, a conversation, and clearly there was an affection that was created.” A scant five years later, the two friends have run a successful presidential campaign, put together their dream team of lawyers and policy thinkers, and are, incidentally, the first African American president and attorney general.

Like Obama’s road to the White House, Holder’s journey to the pinnacle of legal authority in America was somewhat improbable. He was born in New York City, 10 years before the president, to a father from Barbados and a mother from New Jersey. At age 14, he began a daily commute from his mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood in Queens to Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public school in Manhattan. He entered Columbia in the fall of 1969, just in time to grow an Afro and participate in some heated student protests. (Holder, now a trustee of the university, has left both behind.) He entered the university’s law school upon graduation, and after a year at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City, he joined the Justice Department he leads today.

When he first arrived in the capital, the 25-year-old Holder worked as a prosecutor at the agency’s brand-new public–integrity unit and joined a gaggle of young lawyers also making their way in the capital — including successful African Americans like Eric Washington, now chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals; James Dyke, former state secretary of education for Virginia; Alexis Herman, the first black secretary of labor; and then–public defender Charles Ogletree, now a scholar at Harvard Law School, where he taught both Michelle and Barack Obama. The young professionals shot hoops after hours, went to parties, and played rounds of bid whist, a card game popular among African Americans of their generation.

“Clearly he was a star lawyer then,” says Ted Shaw, a Columbia professor and former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who has maintained a close friendship with Holder. “But Eric was down to earth and he was one of the fellas, and still is in many ways,” he says. Adds Ogletree, “The same conversation you’d have with Eric Holder at the Department of Justice you’d have in his living room, or in a quiet conversation during summer break at Martha’s Vineyard, or at a barbecue in Washington, D.C.”

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Green is the New Black

15 02 2010

Green is the New Black,” The Root, 18 February 2010.

The office of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson lies halfway between Congress and the White House. The placement is appropriate; the 48-year-old New Orleans native—the first African American to run the agency tasked with protecting the air, water and health of Americans—walks a line between action and negotiation every day. She keeps a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax—the mythical creature who “speaks for the trees”—in her office, alongside photos of herself grinning with Gen. Colin Powell; her former boss, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine; and President Barack Obama.

Alongside these power shots sits a framed political cartoon of a man representing the town of New Bedford, N.J., dripping with pollution and waste. His hand is outstretched, toward a shovel marked “federal stimulus”—which he will use to dig himself out of the surrounding environmental hell. His words for President Obama, seen at the edge of the cartoon, are simple: “Thanks, brother.”

The sketch epitomizes the radical changes that have accrued at the EPA since the Obama administration hired Jackson, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer and experienced political hand. Once a bastion of resistance to environmental action, the character of the EPA has been drastically altered in the last 12 months. On the first anniversary of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, which provided $80 billion of investment in alternative energy and environmental cleanup, Jackson touted the EPA’s impact on communities like New Bedford—hit hard by twin forces of social inequality and environmental pollution. “We’re here to help,” Jackson told reporters gathered in her office. “We have protection in our name. We’re not the Department of Defense, but part of our job is protecting human health.”

Jackson visited a long-suffering area of Mississippi this month, the first stop on a tour, organized with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, of sites across the country promoting the message of health, non-pollution, economic opportunity and environmental justice. Closest to her heart is the goal of awareness—“putting this agency in the minds of the American people, and not just those who consider themselves environmentalists,” she said. “I grew up in the city; I wasn’t a girl scout; I didn’t camp; I wasn’t a skier; I wasn’t an avid hiker—but the environmentalism I came to know was more about the effects of pollution in society.”

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Bob Dylan’s Black History

13 02 2010

Bob Dylan’s Black History,” The Root, 10 February 2010.

How a skinny white man from Minnesota came to headline the president’s civil rights jam.

The White House commemoration of Black History Month continued with a star-studded event hosted by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama in the East Room of the White House Tuesday evening. The 90-minute concert marked the fifth in a series of inclusive celebrations of music and the arts, including a summer spoken-word event and tributes to Latino and country music. But the civil rights concert, which will be rebroadcast in full on PBS on Feb. 12, had a special significance for the first black president.

“It’s hard to sing in times like that,” said Obama, before handing off emcee duties to actor Morgan Freeman. “But times like that are precisely when the power of song is most potent.  Above the din of hatred; amidst the deafening silence of inaction; the hymns of the civil rights movement helped carry the cause of a people and advance the ideals of a nation.”

Despite last-minute scrambles to accommodate an East Coast snowstorm, the concert featured singers Yolanda Adams, Natalie Cole, Jennifer Hudson, Smokey Robinson, and Joan Baez, choral groups like the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Howard University Choir, and a man the president introduced as “good enough to take a night off from his Never Ending Tour”—Bob Dylan.

Each of the performers has made valuable contributions to American music. But the 69-year-old Dylan has long had a special place in the hearts of civil rights pioneers who remember his provocative and impassioned pleas for justice at the outset of the struggle for equal rights for blacks.

The president mentioned the 1963 March on Washington, where Dylan and Baez, star singers and activists, “joined hundreds of thousands on the National Mall and sang of a day when the time would come.” At the White House concert, longtime head of the NAACP Julian Bond recalled his first meeting with Dylan, after a “freedom summer” concert organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, held in a Mississippi cotton field. “I’ve known him since he first became a musician at 19 or 20 and was involved in social causes—like many folk singers, but unlike many entertainers, both then and today,” Bond said. “Name another.”

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Michelle Obama’s Healthy Eating Campaign

7 02 2010

Michelle Obama’s Healthy Eating Campaign,” The Root, 4 February 2010.

The first lady urges the country to take childhood obesity as its cause.

The White House Kitchen Garden is frozen under, but, this Black History Month, first lady Michelle Obama is once more using food to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that has gripped the country and, she said in a recent speech to the United States’ Conference on Mayors, “never fails to take my breath away.”

It should. The statistics are grim: One-third of young people in the United States are overweight or obese, and one-third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives. In the Latino and black American community, those numbers go up to almost 50 percent. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, children today spend seven hours a day using some kind of media device. At the same time, school lunches are fattier, school gym classes are shorter or nonexistent, and the erosion of 1950s “neighborhood” culture means the days of playing outside until supper are long gone.

Today, said Obama, “medical experts are predicting that this generation is on track to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.” Not only does decreased productivity and life expectancy endanger long-term American economic prosperity, diet-related diseases like asthma, diabetes, hypertension and certain cancers are slowly adding to the national health care burden.

All of this impacts the black community more severely than the rest of America: Black men are 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease, and black women are 1.7 times more likely to be obese than their white counterparts. Black neighborhoods in major cities have been shown to have fewer fresh food options and grocery stores than the average community. And according to the government’s Office of Minority Health, black Americans have reduced access to quality health care. Children who don’t eat well are performing worse in school. At an event with the first lady at a Virginia YMCA, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: “the unhealthier we are as a nation the more our health care costs will continue to rise,” adding that the Obama administration has “not only a moral obligation but economic imperative to begin to make a change.”

Perhaps fittingly, Obama has chosen Black History Month to make her stand, for “smart, strategic efforts to help our kids lead active, healthy lives right from the beginning.” By starting young and staying firm, she hopes to slow the impact of the killer diet that threatens all Americans.

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The State of the Union is Still Uncertain

30 01 2010

The State of the Union is Still Uncertain,” The Root, 27 January 2010.

Obama dogged Congress about deficits that threaten America’s livelihood–and the “deficit of trust” that threatens its democracy.

Capitol Hill is a wild, rowdy beast, and a president either rides it or gets bucked out of town. President Obama has learned that lesson the hard way over the past 12 months, and the question that loomed largest as he strode into Congress for his first State of the Union address was this: Can he regain control of the Beltway’s always fractious debate—or will the “ways of Washington” tear him down?

As has been the case at several high-stakes moments in his political career, Obama rose to the rhetorical task. He laid a heavy guilt trip on the beltway stalwarts who have “for years” stopped progressive change. “We face a deficit of trust—deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works,” he said. “To close that credibility gap, we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue … to give our people the government they deserve.”

Obama then ticked off a long list of ideas—from community college reform to new trade agreements overseas—designed to boost the competitiveness of the American economy, but also to win the approval of his audience of Republicans, Democrats and ordinary Americans. While some of these policies—such as the move to freeze non-military discretionary spending after 2011, or directly challenge the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on corporations and campaigns—are controversial, Obama understood that the State of the Union is the rare speech in which policy details matter far less than tone. Indeed, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted just after the address concluded: “Good policy is probably good politics, but the fact is that what’s important is what it means to the American people.”

So Obama wisely doled out a heap of feel-your-pain empathy, waved the American flag of resilience in the face of hard times, and bashed the banks regularly. He “set the record straight” on just who got the United States deep into debt, and also took responsibility for some of the confusion that has reined in the debate on health care. He also mixed in enough humor to afford himself an occasion to flash that million-dollar smile.

His performance, roundly praised by colleagues in the House and Senate, was critical in a moment in which progressives are disheartened by Obama’s dip in popularity and a crushing electoral defeat in Massachusetts. With November elections just around the corner, congressional Democrats are feeling hounded, and their leadership is openly divided. Republicans are emboldened by the success of their party-of-no strategy. And voters are in a throw-the-bums-out kind of mood—62 percent say the nation is headed in the wrong direction. In the House of Representatives, “We were frustrated and wondering,” says Keith Ellison, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus from Minnesota. “The circumstances that we’re in are difficult, and we were looking for him to shoot some light back into the moment. I think he did a good job of that.”

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Rebuilding a Better Port-au-Prince

19 01 2010

“Rebuilding a Better Port-au-Prince,” The Root, 19 January 2010.

After Haiti’s earthquake, “starchitects” and urban developers ask: What next?

Three days after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that sent Haiti from a developing nation to a flattened one, President Barack Obama addressed a statement directly to the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who cut short a trip to Southeast Asia and traveled to Haiti over the weekend, appeared with Haitian President René Préval to declare: “We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” But one week after the earthquake that claimed up to 200,000 lives and destroyed the backbone of Haiti’s infrastructure, talk is turning from destruction and rescue to mourning and, inevitably, reconstruction.

Rebuilding Haiti will be a tough haul. Major institutions—the national cathedral, the presidential palace—lie toppled. Countless other homes, stores, office buildings and more churches have been reduced to rubble. Debris will need to be cleared before new structures can take their place. Those buildings still standing will need to be tested for safety. Making things worse, Haiti has a notoriously weak state—the sort that couldn’t enforce building codes, or prevent the deforestation that has left the soil unable to deflect routine flooding. Indeed, two-thirds of the buildings in Port-au-Prince were unsafe before the Jan. 12 earthquake. “The challenge for Haiti as compared to New York after 9/11, for example, is the institutional context,” says Diane Davis, a professor of urban planning at MIT who has worked on post-disaster reconstruction in several Latin American cities. “It’s very hard to project a timeline for rebuilding because the situation is so unstable.”

Yet many urban planners, architects and developers are seeing a silver lining in the near-total destruction of a major Haitian city. “It would be a small silver lining if in three years, we see a more sustainable Haiti, with energy efficient, healthy, disaster resistant buildings that makes the nation more resilient to future electricity shortages, public health crises and disasters,” says Matthew Peterson, CEO of Global Green, a sustainable development consulting firm with strong ties to the New Orleans recovery effort. Victoria Harris, CEO of Article 25, a nonprofit architectural consulting firm whose name derives from the United Nations charter naming the built environment as a human right, discussed the opportunity for Haiti to build a truly modern city on the ruins of what came before. “Buildings will affect what people need, want, do—and we want to ensure that they are technically serving their purpose,” she said. But “there is also a chance to build something that is valuable to the community.”

Haiti’s best chance lies in the lessons of history. After the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, recent mudslides in Columbia, earthquakes in Mexico, in rural China and in Nicaragua—not to mention the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States—a template for rebuilding in poor countries has begun to take shape.

Near the fourth anniversary of Katrina, President Obama asked Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan to convene a Long-term Disaster Recovery Working Group. Their interagency mandate, says Fred Tamar, senior HUD adviser and lead staffer for the group, was “to look at disaster recovery and what the federal government could do, working with state and local governments, think tanks and faith-based organizations to help communities impacted by disaster recover more fully and recover faster.”

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Does America Speak Terrorist?

15 01 2010

Does America Speak Terrorist?The Root, 14 January 2010.

In the ongoing fight to defend against violent extremists, language is more important than we’ve given it credit for.

Somali terrorists tried to blow up Barack Obama’s inauguration. Internet yahoos threatened to “lay him out in a box.” He requested Secret Service protection for himself earlier than any presidential candidate in history. And on Christmas, the botched plane bombing by a Nigerian allegedly claiming al-Qaida affiliation exposed America’s security vulnerabilities like never before.

Nevertheless, Americans seem to feel comfortable with the relative level of security that the United States offers. Compared to nations like Israel or Indonesia, bombings are not a daily worry. A recent poll found that Obama’s approval rating for handling terrorism is actually up. But there’s a very worrisome trend: The United States’ intelligence officers do not have the language capabilities needed to root out terror where it lies.

For a nation of immigrants, the United States is surprisingly underprepared to talk with potential terrorists. In a 2009 budget report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a stern warning that language skills in the intelligence apparatus are basically “nonexistent.” “Very few people speak Arabic, and very few have ever been to the region,” one former NCTC analyst told the Washington Independent. U.S. soldiers rely heavily on translators, who are themselves at risk of being targeted by hostile locals. The recent killing of seven CIA agents in Pakistan by a supposed “triple” agent spotlights the dangers of relying on individuals with the linguistic skill set who haven’t been thoroughly vetted.

We’ve had almost 10 years to get this right. After 9/11, an entirely new federal agency was created to keep Americans safe—and not just in airplanes. The Department of Homeland Security, headed by Janet Napolitano, is tasked with defending ports, food and water supplies, as well as guarding against attacks from above. Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, wields unprecedented powers of coordination in the fight against violent extremism. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), also established after 9/11, evokes the Fox television show 24 and describes its mission as “integrating all instruments of national power to ensure unity of effort.”

That sounds good—but with only “eight or nine” analysts assigned to the Middle East and just one analyst committed to the entire Arabian Peninsula (from which suspected Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly obtained his explosives), the NCTC looks like it needs help.

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A New Terror Threat?

2 01 2010

A New Terror Threat?The Root, 26 December 2009.

What the Nigerian plane bomber reveals about Africa, America and terror in the 21st century.

On Christmas Day, a clatter, a puff of smoke and a brief, terrifying flame: Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, had allegedly tried to blow up his airplane. Others aboard the airliner quickly subdued the man, a former University College of London student who claims to have ties to Al-Qaeda and been supplied with explosives from Yemen. The plane landed safely in Detroit, where Mutallab was treated for third degree burns, and where federal police officially charged him with attempting to destroy the jet.

Airport security increased dramatically in several airports in the United States and in Europe as a result of the incident. But this latest botched act of terrorism has wider implications: it raises important questions about sources of new threats to the West, the actual level of U.S. competence in guarding against terror, and yet another American effort to build an important relationship with a fragile, unstable country.

Scrutiny has focused on Muhammad Murtallah International Airport in Lagos, from which Mutallab departed on Christmas Eve. As recently as Thanksgiving 2009, the Nigerian airport was deemed compliant with air safety protocols set by the American Transportation Security Administration and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Association—though over the last decade, it has been intermittently placed on TSA watchlists as one of the least secure airports in the world. Mutallab did not undergo secondary security screening at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam before boarding his flight for the U.S.

Since the failed bombing, reportedly involving PETN, a highly volatile explosive, Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen have claimed credit for training Mutallab—though no U.S. government officials have confirmed those connections. Nevertheless, authorities have called the incident “an attempted terrorist attack”, and president Barack Obama is “actively” monitoring the situation as it develops, according to the White House.

It’s not clear that Mutallab’s actions represent an Al-Qaeda comeback. But the suspect’s Nigerian connections introduce African affairs into what has been seen, since 9/11, as a primarily Middle Eastern threat.

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The Prez in Denmark

20 12 2009

The Prez in Denmark,” The Root, 17 December 2009.

Obama’s trip to the climate conference in Denmark could end in failure.

When President Barack Obama touches down in Copenhagen, Denmark, he will be entering a hornet’s nest of urgent, competing priorities that will test his negotiating skills like never before. Far from the kumbaya conference that one might expect for a gathering devoted to saving the planet, the two weeks of United Nations-sponsored climate talks have been a pitched battle—a literal street fight, at times—to balance the economic interests of the diverse nations in attendance. Poor, industrializing countries are demanding climate aid; rich nations are wary of overpromising both financial assistance and emissions cuts; while island nations and global hot spots seek some assurance that they will not be left to drown or burn.

Since stepping into the national spotlight, Obama’s political image has been that of a master negotiator: As a legislator in Illinois, he helped to broker a deal between Republicans, Democrats, civil liberties advocates and the police regarding the interrogation of suspects. On the campaign trail, he sold himself as a sensible liberal who could “disagree without being disagreeable.” But in Washington, conventional politics have trumped his attempts at good-faith negotiation on issues such as health care reform. In the Middle East, his team of dedicated diplomats has not been particularly successful in promoting the American position. And the last time Obama tried to turn on the charm in Copenhagen—in support of Chicago’s failed bid to host the Olympic Games—was hardly encouraging.

The climate conference is the first test of the political goodwill that flipped American favorability ratings abroad from 17 to 71 percent since George W. Bush left office. While Obama’s major foreign policy addresses in Berlin, Cairo, and most recently, Oslo, have won plaudits from international observers, the Copenhagen crowd will be a tough one.

The White House upped the stakes significantly when it made the choice to bring Obama to the end of the climate talks rather than the beginning. “Based on his conversations with other leaders and the progress that has already been made … the president believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. That decision, said Andrew Light of the liberal Center for American Progress, “may well have prevented the meeting from ending in a dangerous stalemate.” The president also seems to have faith in his ability to close a deal. But will the Obama treatment—a speech and a handshake—really make a difference?

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Copenhagen’s Class Divisions

18 12 2009

Copenhagen’s Class Divisions,” The Root, 8 December 2009.

Developing countries at the United Nations Climate Conference want to be heard—and compensated.

It isn’t often that Russians climb in bed with Rwandans. Yet, as the much-hyped United Nations climate summit convenes in Copenhagen this week, 56 world newspapers united against the growing threat of catastrophic climate change. An editorial urging global action to deflect the worst effects of fossil fuel dependence appeared in major news outlets, including ones in Moscow and Kigali—and in 10 other newspapers published from the African continent. “This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west,” the text, originally drafted by the Guardian UK, read. “Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.”

The pre-Copenhagen coordination is significant for several reasons. For months, the dialogue on climate policy has largely focused on the actions of China and of the United States—powerful and dynamic economies that are the two largest global polluters. Their electricity production, transportation and manufacturing industries account for the lion’s share of world pollution—with populous India not far behind. But these actions have grave consequences for smaller countries. Water wars between Burkina Faso and Ghana, or Pakistan and India, food shortages in Niger or oil shocks in American cities are all destabilizing to the global economy and political order. As the stakes mount and the conversation deepens, a new alliance among nations from the global south is asserting a voice in the debate.

The primary instigator of this new diplomatic dynamic is the African Union. The federation of 51 African states, formed in 2002, along with the G77—representing 130 developing countries—has made a strong push for financial support as it tries to participate in the new, green world order. Chief among its requests, developed in Accra in 2008 and hammered out at a recent AU conference on the environment in Addis Ababa, is the creation of a climate fund to support the greening of emerging markets, via subsidies for alternative energy production, reforestation, drought and flood-preparedness infrastructure, and technology transfer. The precise amount of funding—rumored to be between $50 and $70 billion over several years—has not been determined, but “it carries a lot of weight that the AU is saying something,” says Mwiza Munthale, director of public outreach for TransAfrica Forum. “You’re trying to get the attention of the most powerful countries of the world that do not always look out for the developing world.”

The Obama administration’s final position on American emissions reduction targets is not yet known, though a 17 percent cut (below 2005 levels, by 2020) has been its working number. The White House has also suggested that developed nations provide some $10 billion annually by 2012 to help the global south adapt to climate change—but the G77 and AU, along with China, India, Brazil and South Africa, are pushing for more action on both fronts. “We cannot agree to [halving emissions by 2050] because it implies that … the remaining (cuts) must be done by developing countries,” said Alf Willis, chief climate negotiator for South Africa. African states boycotted a preliminary diplomatic conference in Barcelona in November based on a similar complaint. And the same bloc of nations is insisting that climate aid be a central part of any deal in Copenhagen. “These are the new shifts in global decisionmaking,” says Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. “Having one common platform has strengthened the hand of the region.”

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