| The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Newsletter |
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Newsletter No. 17. 2013
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April 29, 2013
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Greetings!
This issue features Peter Dale Scott's two part article traces the origins and development of the American security state from the era of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy to the era of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Peter Bosshard outlines new guidelines that require Chinese investors abroad to heed environmental standards at a time when many investments in dams and mines have come under scrutiny.
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Peter Bosshard, Holding Chinese Investors to Account: Environmental Impacts
With toxins in the air and dead pigs in the rivers, environmental destruction has become a huge topic in China. The government has closed down hundreds of polluting factories, banks have refused lending for polluters, and protests have derailed numerous destructive projects. For Chinese companies, environmental risks have become business risks.
The same is true internationally. Chinese banks, mining and hydropower companies have faced protests and lost contracts when their projects destroyed the environment. China Southern Power Grid pulled out of Cambodia after concerns emerged about the social impacts of its dam projects, and China Power Investment lost a multi-billion dollar contract for the Myitsone Dam in Burma.
Since 2006, the Chinese government has issued a series of appeals and recommendations calling on companies to respect the environment, community interests and workers' rights when investing abroad.
Peter Bosshard is Policy Director of International Rivers and tweets @PeterBosshard
Recommended Citation: Peter Bosshard, "Holding Chinese Investors to Account: Environmental Impacts," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 17, No. 1, April 29, 2013.
Read More. . .
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Peter Dale Scott, America's Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover's Illegal Powers
Both scholars and ordinary Americans now look back with relief on McCarthyism and "the anticommunist hysteria of the early 1950s," in the belief that we have outgrown such paranoia and disregard for law and human rights. But the personal excesses of McCarthy were surface manifestations of deeper illegal institutional procedures, mostly initiated by J. Edgar Hoover, that never really ended, and indeed have since proliferated. This has been especially true since the implementation of Continuity of Government (COG) measures on 9/11, measures that for two decades had been refined in the Pentagon's "Doomsday Project," by an extra-governmental (and arguably unconstitutional) secret committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As Patrick Thronson has observed in a law journal article, "continuity-of-government procedures...confer powers on the President-such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus-that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order." Yet some of these measures were then hastily made law in the USA PATRIOT act of 2001, in support of the so-called "War on Terror."
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "America's Unchecked Security State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of J. Edgar Hoover's Illegal Powers," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013.
Read more . . .
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Peter Dale Scott, America's Unchecked Security State: America's Unchecked Security State: Part II: The Continuity of COG Detention Planning, 1948-2001.
In November 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, Hoover also began to compile a list of individuals to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. In June 1940 he sought and gained the approval of Attorney General Robert Jackson for this list, known as the Custodial Detention list. (Late in life, Jackson appears to have regretted the powers that Hoover accumulated.) The author traces the development of COG detention planning to this era.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "America's Unchecked Security State: America's Unchecked Security State: Part II: The Continuity of COG Detention Planning, 1948-2001," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 17, No. 2, April 29, 2013.
Read more . . .
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