The justices rule that civil rights law protects a woman who was fired after answering questions in a harassment probe.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the January 27, 2009 edition
Employees who provide evidence during an informal investigation of discrimination in the workplace are legally protected against retaliation from the boss or other senior managers.
In an important workers' rights decision announced Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shields employees from retaliatory acts even when the employee hasn't filed a formal complaint.
In an eight-page decision written by Justice David Souter, the high court cast a broad blanket of protection over American workers struggling in a hostile work environment. Those employees who help identify and root out allegedly discriminatory actions by senior managers and supervisors – even though they may not have filed a formal complaint – are nonetheless protected from retaliation, the court said.
The decision puts managers and supervisors on notice that they face legal consequences if they use their power in the organization to try to cover up their own discriminatory actions by retaliating against complaining employees. In addition, the decision puts employees on notice that, when they come forward to help expose discrimination in the workplace, they clearly enjoy the protections of the law.
The decision comes in the case of Vicky Crawford, a 30-year employee in the payroll department of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tenn. Ms. Crawford agreed to answer questions during an informal inquiry into allegations that the director of employee relations had engaged in sexual harassment of female workers in the office. Among the director's duties was investigation of sexual-harassment complaints.
Crawford did not initiate the investigation, nor had she filed any formal charges. The internal inquiry was conducted by a female lawyer in the legal department. Crawford told the lawyer she was afraid she might lose her job if she told the truth about the manager's behavior.
Crawford eventually answered the questions. She was one of three women who told the lawyer that the director of employee relations had made repeated inappropriate gestures and comments of a sexual nature in the workplace.
After the investigation, the director of employee relations received a verbal reprimand, but no other disciplinary action was taken. Senior management then began an investigation of Crawford and her department. She and the two other women were fired.
Crawford sued, claiming protection under Title VII. But a federal judge and a panel of the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against her. They said Title VII protects only those employees who had demonstrated active "opposition" to the alleged conduct by having already filed a formal discrimination charge with the company or the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
On Monday, the Supreme Court reversed that decision.
"The Sixth Circuit thought answering questions fell short of opposition, taking the view that the [law] demands active, consistent opposing activities to warrant protection against retaliation," Justice Souter wrote. "Though these requirements obviously exemplify opposition as commonly understood, they are not limits of it."
He noted that, for example, many people are known to oppose capital punishment without writing public letters or demonstrating in the streets. "We would call it 'opposition' if an employee took a stand against an employer's discriminatory practices not by instigating action, but by standing pat, say, by refusing to follow a supervisor's order to fire a junior worker for discriminatory reasons."
The central issue in the case was whether Crawford's actions were sufficient to trigger the protections of the law. In passing Title VII, Congress outlawed retaliation against employees who "participate" in a discrimination probe or who "oppose" a form of discrimination they are encountering.
In its decision, the high court focused on the statute's "opposition" requirement and concluded that Crawford's answering of the company lawyers' questions qualified as "opposition" under Title VII.
Lawyers for the Metropolitan Government have argued in the case that Crawford couldn't claim antiretaliation protection under Title VII because she hadn't filed a formal charge with the EEOC against the senior manager or taken other direct action in opposition to the alleged harassment.
The high court disagreed. "Nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question," Souter wrote.
Employment lawyers had warned that the Sixth Circuit's view of the law would create a strong incentive for workers to stay silent in the face of discrimination and retaliation by their bosses. Some say that incentive already existed.
According to one study, 62 percent of state workers who complained of sexual harassment reported that they faced retaliation in the form of lowered job evaluations, denial of promotions, and being transferred or fired.
More than half of women in the US face some form of workplace sexual harassment, and most of them never report it, according to the National Women's Law Center.
Souter recognized the danger in his opinion. "If it were clear law that an employee who reported discrimination in answering an employer's questions could be penalized with no remedy, prudent employees would have good reason to keep quiet," he wrote. "The [Sixth Circuit] appeals court rule would thus create a real dilemma for any knowledgeable employee in a hostile work environment."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0127/p03s01-usju.html
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Iraq won't allow Blackwater to operate in country
By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press writer Sinan Salaheddin, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 37 mins ago
BAGHDAD – Iraq will not allow Blackwater Worldwide to continue providing security protection for U.S. diplomats in the country, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Thursday.
Blackwater's image in Iraq was irrevocably tarnished by the September 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square. Five former Blackwater guards pleaded not guilty Jan. 6 in federal court in Washington to manslaughter and gun charges in that shooting.
The decision not to issue Blackwater an operating license was due to "improper conduct and excessive use of force," said Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf.
Neither Khalaf nor a U.S. Embassy official gave a date for Blackwater personnel to leave the country and neither said whether they would be allowed to continue guarding U.S. diplomats during the interim.
A U.S.-Iraqi security agreement approved in November gives the Iraqis the authority to determine which Western security companies operate in Iraq.
Blackwater employees who have not been implicated in the shooting have the right to work with a different employer.
"We sent our decision to the U.S. Embassy last Friday," Khalaf told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "They have to find a new security company."
The U.S. Embassy official confirmed it received the government's decision, saying that U.S. officials were working with the Iraqi government and its contractors to address the "implications of this decision."
The official made the statement on condition of anonymity under embassy regulations.
In the 2007 shooting, Blackwater maintains its guards opened fire after coming under attack after a car in a State Department convoy broke down.
The Iraqi government has labeled the guards "criminals" and is closely watching the case.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq/print
BAGHDAD – Iraq will not allow Blackwater Worldwide to continue providing security protection for U.S. diplomats in the country, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Thursday.
Blackwater's image in Iraq was irrevocably tarnished by the September 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square. Five former Blackwater guards pleaded not guilty Jan. 6 in federal court in Washington to manslaughter and gun charges in that shooting.
The decision not to issue Blackwater an operating license was due to "improper conduct and excessive use of force," said Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf.
Neither Khalaf nor a U.S. Embassy official gave a date for Blackwater personnel to leave the country and neither said whether they would be allowed to continue guarding U.S. diplomats during the interim.
A U.S.-Iraqi security agreement approved in November gives the Iraqis the authority to determine which Western security companies operate in Iraq.
Blackwater employees who have not been implicated in the shooting have the right to work with a different employer.
"We sent our decision to the U.S. Embassy last Friday," Khalaf told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "They have to find a new security company."
The U.S. Embassy official confirmed it received the government's decision, saying that U.S. officials were working with the Iraqi government and its contractors to address the "implications of this decision."
The official made the statement on condition of anonymity under embassy regulations.
In the 2007 shooting, Blackwater maintains its guards opened fire after coming under attack after a car in a State Department convoy broke down.
The Iraqi government has labeled the guards "criminals" and is closely watching the case.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq/print
Holder Nomination Approved by Senate Judiciary
By Keith Perine, CQ Staff Keith Perine, Cq Staff Wed Jan 28, 12:57 pm ET
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved the nomination of Eric H. Holder Jr. to be attorney general by a wide, bipartisan vote.
The panel voted 17-2 to recommend that the full Senate confirm Holder. Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma voted no.
The full Senate is expected to vote as early as Thursday. "It'll either be tomorrow or Friday," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., said. "We'd like it to be sooner rather than later," he said, but added that the Senate first must complete action on an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (HR 2).
Durbin said he did not anticipate GOP delaying tactics. "The vote was so strong in committee, I feel good on the floor," he said.
Although the fate of Holder's nomination was never seriously in doubt, committee Republicans had questioned whether he would be politically independent from President Obama. Republicans, led by ranking member Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, had pointed to Holder's involvement, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, in controversial pardons Clinton issued in 1999 and 2001.
"Eric Holder is a good man," committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said. "He's a decent man, he's a public servant committed to the rule of law, and he will be a good attorney general."
Specter said endorsements of Holder by people such as former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, and the traditional deference the Senate gives presidents in filling Cabinet posts, "overbalances" his misgivings about Holder's role in the Clinton pardons.
"I'm aware of the enormous problems President Obama faces," Specter said. "To the extent there can be cooperation, consistent with my conscience and our responsibilities under separation of powers, checks and balances, I intend to cooperate with President Obama."
Republicans had fretted that Holder's involvement in the clemencies Clinton granted to 16 Puerto Rican separatists in 1999, and his 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, could mean that he would be too willing to bow to Obama's wishes.
Cornyn said he felt that Holder had not sufficiently explained his role in those matters. Cornyn said that "nothing in Holder's testimony convincingly rebuts the widely held suspicion" that his posture regarding the Rich pardon was "based on the desire to give president Clinton the answer he wanted."
Seasoned Nominee If confirmed, Holder will be the first African-American attorney general. Leahy said that a vote against Holder "would put that senator in the wrong side of history."
Unlike the last several attorneys general, Holder has extensive experience inside the Justice Department, where he prosecuted public corruption straight out of Columbia Law School in 1976.
He has been through the Senate confirmation process three times before. He was named to the District of Columbia Superior Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. President Bill Clinton made him the District's U.S. attorney in 1993. And from 1997 until the end of the Clinton administration, Holder was deputy attorney general.
Since leaving the government, he has been a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington and Burling.
After Holder is confirmed, Leahy said he will begin to process Obama's nominations to other senior Justice Department posts.
Specter, who had been Holder's fiercest Senate critic, decided to vote for him after meeting with him privately on Jan. 22, at Leahy's suggestion.
"I think it's been a learning experience for Mr. Holder and for all of us," Specter said.
-- Kathleen Hunter contributed to this story.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20090128/pl_cq_politics/politics3019856_3/print
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved the nomination of Eric H. Holder Jr. to be attorney general by a wide, bipartisan vote.
The panel voted 17-2 to recommend that the full Senate confirm Holder. Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma voted no.
The full Senate is expected to vote as early as Thursday. "It'll either be tomorrow or Friday," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., said. "We'd like it to be sooner rather than later," he said, but added that the Senate first must complete action on an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (HR 2).
Durbin said he did not anticipate GOP delaying tactics. "The vote was so strong in committee, I feel good on the floor," he said.
Although the fate of Holder's nomination was never seriously in doubt, committee Republicans had questioned whether he would be politically independent from President Obama. Republicans, led by ranking member Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, had pointed to Holder's involvement, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, in controversial pardons Clinton issued in 1999 and 2001.
"Eric Holder is a good man," committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said. "He's a decent man, he's a public servant committed to the rule of law, and he will be a good attorney general."
Specter said endorsements of Holder by people such as former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, and the traditional deference the Senate gives presidents in filling Cabinet posts, "overbalances" his misgivings about Holder's role in the Clinton pardons.
"I'm aware of the enormous problems President Obama faces," Specter said. "To the extent there can be cooperation, consistent with my conscience and our responsibilities under separation of powers, checks and balances, I intend to cooperate with President Obama."
Republicans had fretted that Holder's involvement in the clemencies Clinton granted to 16 Puerto Rican separatists in 1999, and his 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, could mean that he would be too willing to bow to Obama's wishes.
Cornyn said he felt that Holder had not sufficiently explained his role in those matters. Cornyn said that "nothing in Holder's testimony convincingly rebuts the widely held suspicion" that his posture regarding the Rich pardon was "based on the desire to give president Clinton the answer he wanted."
Seasoned Nominee If confirmed, Holder will be the first African-American attorney general. Leahy said that a vote against Holder "would put that senator in the wrong side of history."
Unlike the last several attorneys general, Holder has extensive experience inside the Justice Department, where he prosecuted public corruption straight out of Columbia Law School in 1976.
He has been through the Senate confirmation process three times before. He was named to the District of Columbia Superior Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. President Bill Clinton made him the District's U.S. attorney in 1993. And from 1997 until the end of the Clinton administration, Holder was deputy attorney general.
Since leaving the government, he has been a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington and Burling.
After Holder is confirmed, Leahy said he will begin to process Obama's nominations to other senior Justice Department posts.
Specter, who had been Holder's fiercest Senate critic, decided to vote for him after meeting with him privately on Jan. 22, at Leahy's suggestion.
"I think it's been a learning experience for Mr. Holder and for all of us," Specter said.
-- Kathleen Hunter contributed to this story.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20090128/pl_cq_politics/politics3019856_3/print
Life after the apocalypse
What if the doomsayers are right ... what if society, as we know it, really is about to collapse? Do you have what it takes to make it in a world without electricity and running water? Tanya Gold offers an essential survival guide
Tanya Gold
The Guardian, Thursday 29 January 2009
I am standing in a wood with a tall man and a dead pheasant. There is blood everywhere: on my shoes, my hands, my face. Why am I here? Because the man - his name is Leon Durbin - is preparing me for the apocalypse, now.
What would happen if you awoke one morning and everyone was dead? Or if, less melodramatically, the world as we know it - and our teetering financial systems - ceased to function? What if you awoke to find your bubble-wrapped, gilded life was over, and for good? Could you survive? Could I?
I am an urban girl. I have no skills except whingeing and bingeing. I can barely open a packet of Hobnobs without an explosive device. But, unlike you, doomed and dying reader, I have decided to prepare for The End, and I am prepared to share the life-saving knowledge I will accrue. This is your cut-out-and-keep guide to the apocalypse. Put it in a drawer. One day you may need it.
So you wake up; everyone is dead. For the purpose of this exercise, imagine it's like Survivors, the cheap BBC rendition of the apocalypse, where a plague wipes out humanity and then everyone is mildly annoyed that the trains are delayed. We could imagine total financial or ecological collapse leading to the failure of social structures, but let's say it's a plague. So, how long can you stay in your house?
The answer is: not long. According to the people at the National Grid, the electricity will stop. So will the water. These systems have buttons. Buttons need fingers. Fingers need people who are alive. You have a day, maybe two, of electricity. Then you will be in darkness, with no way of washing your face.
What should you do? You can steal food from supermarkets but the rotting corpses on the floor of Sainsbury's will be fetid fonts of infection. And if you try to sit out the plague in your home, you could burn or drown. After a lightning strike, fires will begin and they will not stop. And if you live in London, the Thames barrier will fail without electricity and the low-lying areas of the city will flood.
So you have to leave. But where do you go? The apocalyptic norm - see 28 Days Later and Survivors - is for survivors to sit in desirable country mansions, eat tinned tomatoes, develop post-traumatic psychosis and shoot each other. Never in any apocalyptic scenario in any movie I have seen - and I have seen them all - does anyone try to live off the land. They prefer to feed on the crumbs of the lost civilisation. It never works. How can you rebuild civilisation with tinned tomatoes? You need to grow your own food.
But where? I choose Devon. It is warm and wet and fertile, and I have been happy there. There are cows. This is where I would live off the land, but I need to learn how. This thinking has led me to Durbin and the dead bird.
Durbin is tall and tweedy. He is the sort of man who keeps firewood kindling in his pocket, just in case. He owns Wildwood Bushcraft, a company that explains how to survive if you are dropped into the wilderness with no supplies, no warning and no clue.
Durbin leads me through the spindly, sleeping trees, pointing out different kinds of branch and bush, and their uses. According to him, the wood is a shop that will give you everything you need. "Willow bark can be boiled to relieve a headache," he says. "Yew is for making long bows. Oak is for shelters. Ash is for tool handles. Have you ever had a beech-leaf sandwich?" I don't bother replying.
To be competent in bushcraft, you have to be well equipped: before you leave the city, stop for a saw, chisel, spade, axe and hunting knife. Durbin has them all. They poke out of his rucksack in a manly fashion.
We arrive at a clearing and Durbin demonstrates how to light a fire. He places a small block of wood on the ground and puts a wooden stake on it, point down. He takes a bow, made of wood and string, places it round the stake and, when he moves the bow in a sideways motion, the stake rotates very fast. Its friction with the block of wood magically creates a pile of super-hot matter. It can ignite dry hay or bark. This creates a conflagration that can light a fire.
How will I get water? Durbin runs bushcraft weekends for angry executives here, so he knows where it is. "Water," I cry, lunging at a small stream. "Careful," says Durbin. "We have to filter the water with a sock full of sand. Then we have to bring it to a rolling boil." Why a sock? He ignores me.
Food is harder. It is winter and the countryside is closed for repairs. My two main vegetarian foods, Durbin explains, will be burdock root and hazelnut. Both are high-energy. You can make chips out of burdock and you can boil, mash and dry hazelnut to produce a repulsive kind of biscuit. Durbin picks up a spade and starts digging for burdock. He finds some, but it's rotten. "Winter," he sighs. "Hmmm."
So, with a fiendish flourish, I produce a dead pheasant from my handbag. I had spent the day before negotiating with the Guardian as to the legal and moral implications of murdering a rabbit for the purposes of this article. Finally we had compromised, and I had gone to a posh butcher's in Mayfair and bought this beautiful pheasant for £3.50. Durbin looks impressed. "You have to pull off its head," he says. "Just twist it."
I close my eyes and twist. The head comes off easily; it feels like wringing out a slightly damp scarf. Then Durbin makes a hole in the pheasant's bottom and I stick my hand up and clutch everything inside. Out comes a squelchy mass of once-living flesh. Durbin grabs the heart and cuts it open. "Very nutritious," he says. I am slightly sick in my mouth. I pluck, and soon I have a pile of bloodstained feathers - and a nude bird. Durbin sticks it on a spit over the fire. When it is cooked, we eat it. It tastes slightly of excrement but I still feel strangely empowered. It was much easier than I thought it would be, to rip this bird apart.
I now have bloodlust. I ask Durbin how to trap animals. I could theoretically shoot them, but trapping is more suitable for the lazy or incompetent survivor. He looks slightly nervous. "It's illegal," he says slowly. But I prod and he tells me about different types of trap. I could try the pit trap, he says, where you dig a hole in the forest floor, line it with sharpened stakes and camouflage it. It is for large animals - deer, wild boar, parents, other journalists. There is also the deadfall trap, which is for small animals. They saunter over a trigger mechanism, and a lump of wood falls on their head. Bon appetit and ha ha.
But what would I eat if I couldn't trap? "Bugs," says Durbin happily. "Worms." There are 40 calories in a worm, apparently; this is the equivalent of two Maltesers. "Or snails," he adds. "But quarantine the snail for three days before you eat it. It may have eaten poisonous plants, and you will have to wait until it expels them."
Now you need shelter. If I had the choice, I would probably look for a small stone cottage - hardy and easy to maintain - but if I am foraging, I have to go to where the food is. So Durbin shows me how to make a survival shelter. He hurls logs up against a tree trunk, and covers them with a foot of leaves and bracken and mud. "It is waterproof," he says. I climb in and lie down. It is a hole that only a troll could love. But there they are, the four pillars of survival: food, water, fire and shelter.
The next day, I go to Pullabrook Wood in Devon to practise my skills. It was easy to survive yesterday, with Durbin standing by. Can I cope alone? Pullabrook is a lovely wood, administered by the Woodland Trust. It is full of happy Tories and happy Labradors. But now I have my own mini-apocalypse. I fail at bow drilling. I find a stream, but a happy Tory says the water is poisonous, even if filtered by sock. Why? "Because sheep droppings have contaminated it," he says. Death by Sheep is only slightly behind Death by Snail in the encyclopaedia of embarrassing ways to die.
The first shelter I build is too small for me to enter. My second shelter collapses. I decide to abandon bushcraft. I will try my hand at farming. Woman cannot live on worm alone.
So, a few days later, I am standing inside an Iron Age roundhouse at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire. Butser is a project that re-enacts Iron Age life. The roundhouse is huge and round and dim. I feel a bit as if I am standing inside a giant breast. Steve Dyer is the archaeological director. He is tall and red-faced, with a frizzy white beard.
"Roundhouses are easy to make," he says, waving his arms. He points out two animal skulls, tied to the entrance posts. Is that a cow's skull? Dyer grimaces politely. "It's a horse," he says, before proceeding to tell me how to make a roundhouse.
The ingredients are: 27 large oak trees, 60 small oak trees, 100 hazel trees, 100 ash trees, wheat straw for thatching, and animal hair, clay, manure, soil and water for the walls.
You will also need animals. Dyer escorts me to his pigpen to meet two nameless pigs. To domesticate animals, he says, you just have to enclose them in smaller and smaller areas. Provide them with what they need - food, water and attention - and they will obey you. You can then eat them, and peel them, and tan their hides for soft furnishings. But beware of sheep, he says, waving a bright red finger. "I know this guy called Si," he says. "He approached a frisky ram. It jumped up and broke his nose." I am back at Death by Sheep.
I telephone the psychologist Cecelia De Felice. I want to know if I will go insane in my new one-woman world, especially when faced with tasks such as chopping down 27 large oaks. "You will be in a state of trauma," she agrees. "You will quickly become lonely and paranoid. It is possible you will have a breakdown." And if I meet other survivors? Be cautious, she advises. "They too will be lonely and paranoid. Of course you are stronger in a group. But you do not know whether they will help you or just steal your resources. Trust no one."
I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. "It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames," he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? "I would probably go to Canada," he says. "There aren't many nuclear power stations in Canada."
So, it comes to this. No matter how hard you try, Britain will probably become a nuclear wasteland. The snails that are your lunch will either die, or look very weird. So, again, what to do? My considered advice is this. You, Guardian reader, need to begin building a boat - a sailing ship, actually - to take you to - yes, Canada. Before you leave the city you should pause at a library and steal the entire boat-making and maintenance shelf. Canada may be your only hope of salvation. And that is as fitting an obituary for our civilisation as I can type. In The End, it turns out you don't just have to be the heroine of Survivors. You need to bloody well be Noah too.
Happy apocalypse.
It's not all bad: Fun things you could do after the apocalypse
• Pop into the National Gallery and take Jan Van Eyck's Portrait of a Man off the wall. (If you have no taste, take a Renoir.) The Van Eyck is hanging in the Sainsbury Wing. If you want to preserve it properly, Thomas Almeroth-Williams of the National Gallery suggests you store it in a slate mine, where the temperature and humidity levels are perfect for its conservation.
• Go to the British Library and help yourself to one of its two copies of Shakespeare's First Folio. One is in a box in a strong room under the library floor; the other is in a glass case in the Treasure Room. If you want to preserve it properly, Helen Shenton of the British Library suggests you store it in a cool, dark place, and watch it carefully for infestations by animals or fungi. Dust regularly.
• Steal the crown jewels. If you can. "There are contingency plans in place in event of a power failure," says a Royal Palaces spokesperson, "so the crown jewels should remain safe." Really? To preserve them properly, do nothing. A diamond is for ever.
• Invade the News of the World - it's in Wapping - and read all its secret files. Then break into M15. It's on Millbank. Read all its secret files too. Oh, no! She was murdered! I knew it!
• Go and stand on the stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Skip over the bodies of the dead actors. Re-enact the whole of Oliver!
The vital skills you will need
How to make bread
I type this in full because I want bread at The End, and I want you to have it too (should you survive). So, clear the land, turn the soil over to create furrows, take seed from any wheat growing wild, sow it 20cm apart and kick the soil over. Make sure that the birds don't eat the seed.
Stop browsing animals by hedging the field off and root out weeds. When the corn is ripe, thresh it by hitting it with a stick and mill it by rubbing it between large stones. Add the flour to water to make dough. Stick it in a pan on the fire. Result? Wholemeal flatbread!
How to make sanitary products and toilet paper
Find some sphagnum moss and use that. It is very spongy and it contains iodine, so it is slightly antiseptic.
How to eat snails
Always, always quarantine snails before eating them. Take the snail and put it where there is nothing for it to eat. Ignore its cries of hunger, leave for three days and then consume.
How to purify water
Collect the water from the purest source available, ideally a spring, minimising sediment and avoiding chemical contamination. Filter it through a sock full of sand. Sterilise the water by bringing it to a rolling boil for a few seconds.
How to clay bake a fish
Wrap the fish in large leaves, tying up the parcel with nettle stalk. Dig for clay in the earth. After combining the clay with water, cover the fish with a centimetre of clay, leaving no cracks. Scrape a shallow pit in the centre of the fire and lay the fish in it. Cover the fish with embers. After an hour, remove the fish and crack the outer shell open. The fish should be perfectly cooked.
How to remove the skin from a cow
You can kill a cow by strangulation apparently, although I have never met anyone who has done it. Or you can cut its throat, or spear it through the heart. Split the cow along its belly from the groin to the throat. Remove the internal organs. Hang the cow up by its hooves for several days to let the blood run out. Cows are heavy, so do not attempt to do this alone. To take the skin off, slide a blade or a sharp stone between the skin and the flesh. Once you have inserted the tool a little way, you can just peel the skin off.
How to shoot a deer with a bow and arrow
Deer are sensitive to human noise and smell. If you stomp through the wood with a bow and arrow you will never find one. Find out where the deer are going to be - they often walk the same way to the same place. Camouflage your scent, be quiet and do not move. When you see a deer, shoot it from 20m away. You ideally need a kill shot, eg in a lung. You don't want to hit it in the bottom, because it will run off and you won't get your dinner. TG
• Sources: Leon Durbin (Wildwood Bushcraft), Steve Dyer (Butser Ancient Farm) and Ben Jones (Merlin Archery Centre).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/29/apocalypse-survival-guide-tanya-gold
Tanya Gold
The Guardian, Thursday 29 January 2009
I am standing in a wood with a tall man and a dead pheasant. There is blood everywhere: on my shoes, my hands, my face. Why am I here? Because the man - his name is Leon Durbin - is preparing me for the apocalypse, now.
What would happen if you awoke one morning and everyone was dead? Or if, less melodramatically, the world as we know it - and our teetering financial systems - ceased to function? What if you awoke to find your bubble-wrapped, gilded life was over, and for good? Could you survive? Could I?
I am an urban girl. I have no skills except whingeing and bingeing. I can barely open a packet of Hobnobs without an explosive device. But, unlike you, doomed and dying reader, I have decided to prepare for The End, and I am prepared to share the life-saving knowledge I will accrue. This is your cut-out-and-keep guide to the apocalypse. Put it in a drawer. One day you may need it.
So you wake up; everyone is dead. For the purpose of this exercise, imagine it's like Survivors, the cheap BBC rendition of the apocalypse, where a plague wipes out humanity and then everyone is mildly annoyed that the trains are delayed. We could imagine total financial or ecological collapse leading to the failure of social structures, but let's say it's a plague. So, how long can you stay in your house?
The answer is: not long. According to the people at the National Grid, the electricity will stop. So will the water. These systems have buttons. Buttons need fingers. Fingers need people who are alive. You have a day, maybe two, of electricity. Then you will be in darkness, with no way of washing your face.
What should you do? You can steal food from supermarkets but the rotting corpses on the floor of Sainsbury's will be fetid fonts of infection. And if you try to sit out the plague in your home, you could burn or drown. After a lightning strike, fires will begin and they will not stop. And if you live in London, the Thames barrier will fail without electricity and the low-lying areas of the city will flood.
So you have to leave. But where do you go? The apocalyptic norm - see 28 Days Later and Survivors - is for survivors to sit in desirable country mansions, eat tinned tomatoes, develop post-traumatic psychosis and shoot each other. Never in any apocalyptic scenario in any movie I have seen - and I have seen them all - does anyone try to live off the land. They prefer to feed on the crumbs of the lost civilisation. It never works. How can you rebuild civilisation with tinned tomatoes? You need to grow your own food.
But where? I choose Devon. It is warm and wet and fertile, and I have been happy there. There are cows. This is where I would live off the land, but I need to learn how. This thinking has led me to Durbin and the dead bird.
Durbin is tall and tweedy. He is the sort of man who keeps firewood kindling in his pocket, just in case. He owns Wildwood Bushcraft, a company that explains how to survive if you are dropped into the wilderness with no supplies, no warning and no clue.
Durbin leads me through the spindly, sleeping trees, pointing out different kinds of branch and bush, and their uses. According to him, the wood is a shop that will give you everything you need. "Willow bark can be boiled to relieve a headache," he says. "Yew is for making long bows. Oak is for shelters. Ash is for tool handles. Have you ever had a beech-leaf sandwich?" I don't bother replying.
To be competent in bushcraft, you have to be well equipped: before you leave the city, stop for a saw, chisel, spade, axe and hunting knife. Durbin has them all. They poke out of his rucksack in a manly fashion.
We arrive at a clearing and Durbin demonstrates how to light a fire. He places a small block of wood on the ground and puts a wooden stake on it, point down. He takes a bow, made of wood and string, places it round the stake and, when he moves the bow in a sideways motion, the stake rotates very fast. Its friction with the block of wood magically creates a pile of super-hot matter. It can ignite dry hay or bark. This creates a conflagration that can light a fire.
How will I get water? Durbin runs bushcraft weekends for angry executives here, so he knows where it is. "Water," I cry, lunging at a small stream. "Careful," says Durbin. "We have to filter the water with a sock full of sand. Then we have to bring it to a rolling boil." Why a sock? He ignores me.
Food is harder. It is winter and the countryside is closed for repairs. My two main vegetarian foods, Durbin explains, will be burdock root and hazelnut. Both are high-energy. You can make chips out of burdock and you can boil, mash and dry hazelnut to produce a repulsive kind of biscuit. Durbin picks up a spade and starts digging for burdock. He finds some, but it's rotten. "Winter," he sighs. "Hmmm."
So, with a fiendish flourish, I produce a dead pheasant from my handbag. I had spent the day before negotiating with the Guardian as to the legal and moral implications of murdering a rabbit for the purposes of this article. Finally we had compromised, and I had gone to a posh butcher's in Mayfair and bought this beautiful pheasant for £3.50. Durbin looks impressed. "You have to pull off its head," he says. "Just twist it."
I close my eyes and twist. The head comes off easily; it feels like wringing out a slightly damp scarf. Then Durbin makes a hole in the pheasant's bottom and I stick my hand up and clutch everything inside. Out comes a squelchy mass of once-living flesh. Durbin grabs the heart and cuts it open. "Very nutritious," he says. I am slightly sick in my mouth. I pluck, and soon I have a pile of bloodstained feathers - and a nude bird. Durbin sticks it on a spit over the fire. When it is cooked, we eat it. It tastes slightly of excrement but I still feel strangely empowered. It was much easier than I thought it would be, to rip this bird apart.
I now have bloodlust. I ask Durbin how to trap animals. I could theoretically shoot them, but trapping is more suitable for the lazy or incompetent survivor. He looks slightly nervous. "It's illegal," he says slowly. But I prod and he tells me about different types of trap. I could try the pit trap, he says, where you dig a hole in the forest floor, line it with sharpened stakes and camouflage it. It is for large animals - deer, wild boar, parents, other journalists. There is also the deadfall trap, which is for small animals. They saunter over a trigger mechanism, and a lump of wood falls on their head. Bon appetit and ha ha.
But what would I eat if I couldn't trap? "Bugs," says Durbin happily. "Worms." There are 40 calories in a worm, apparently; this is the equivalent of two Maltesers. "Or snails," he adds. "But quarantine the snail for three days before you eat it. It may have eaten poisonous plants, and you will have to wait until it expels them."
Now you need shelter. If I had the choice, I would probably look for a small stone cottage - hardy and easy to maintain - but if I am foraging, I have to go to where the food is. So Durbin shows me how to make a survival shelter. He hurls logs up against a tree trunk, and covers them with a foot of leaves and bracken and mud. "It is waterproof," he says. I climb in and lie down. It is a hole that only a troll could love. But there they are, the four pillars of survival: food, water, fire and shelter.
The next day, I go to Pullabrook Wood in Devon to practise my skills. It was easy to survive yesterday, with Durbin standing by. Can I cope alone? Pullabrook is a lovely wood, administered by the Woodland Trust. It is full of happy Tories and happy Labradors. But now I have my own mini-apocalypse. I fail at bow drilling. I find a stream, but a happy Tory says the water is poisonous, even if filtered by sock. Why? "Because sheep droppings have contaminated it," he says. Death by Sheep is only slightly behind Death by Snail in the encyclopaedia of embarrassing ways to die.
The first shelter I build is too small for me to enter. My second shelter collapses. I decide to abandon bushcraft. I will try my hand at farming. Woman cannot live on worm alone.
So, a few days later, I am standing inside an Iron Age roundhouse at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire. Butser is a project that re-enacts Iron Age life. The roundhouse is huge and round and dim. I feel a bit as if I am standing inside a giant breast. Steve Dyer is the archaeological director. He is tall and red-faced, with a frizzy white beard.
"Roundhouses are easy to make," he says, waving his arms. He points out two animal skulls, tied to the entrance posts. Is that a cow's skull? Dyer grimaces politely. "It's a horse," he says, before proceeding to tell me how to make a roundhouse.
The ingredients are: 27 large oak trees, 60 small oak trees, 100 hazel trees, 100 ash trees, wheat straw for thatching, and animal hair, clay, manure, soil and water for the walls.
You will also need animals. Dyer escorts me to his pigpen to meet two nameless pigs. To domesticate animals, he says, you just have to enclose them in smaller and smaller areas. Provide them with what they need - food, water and attention - and they will obey you. You can then eat them, and peel them, and tan their hides for soft furnishings. But beware of sheep, he says, waving a bright red finger. "I know this guy called Si," he says. "He approached a frisky ram. It jumped up and broke his nose." I am back at Death by Sheep.
I telephone the psychologist Cecelia De Felice. I want to know if I will go insane in my new one-woman world, especially when faced with tasks such as chopping down 27 large oaks. "You will be in a state of trauma," she agrees. "You will quickly become lonely and paranoid. It is possible you will have a breakdown." And if I meet other survivors? Be cautious, she advises. "They too will be lonely and paranoid. Of course you are stronger in a group. But you do not know whether they will help you or just steal your resources. Trust no one."
I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. "It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames," he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? "I would probably go to Canada," he says. "There aren't many nuclear power stations in Canada."
So, it comes to this. No matter how hard you try, Britain will probably become a nuclear wasteland. The snails that are your lunch will either die, or look very weird. So, again, what to do? My considered advice is this. You, Guardian reader, need to begin building a boat - a sailing ship, actually - to take you to - yes, Canada. Before you leave the city you should pause at a library and steal the entire boat-making and maintenance shelf. Canada may be your only hope of salvation. And that is as fitting an obituary for our civilisation as I can type. In The End, it turns out you don't just have to be the heroine of Survivors. You need to bloody well be Noah too.
Happy apocalypse.
It's not all bad: Fun things you could do after the apocalypse
• Pop into the National Gallery and take Jan Van Eyck's Portrait of a Man off the wall. (If you have no taste, take a Renoir.) The Van Eyck is hanging in the Sainsbury Wing. If you want to preserve it properly, Thomas Almeroth-Williams of the National Gallery suggests you store it in a slate mine, where the temperature and humidity levels are perfect for its conservation.
• Go to the British Library and help yourself to one of its two copies of Shakespeare's First Folio. One is in a box in a strong room under the library floor; the other is in a glass case in the Treasure Room. If you want to preserve it properly, Helen Shenton of the British Library suggests you store it in a cool, dark place, and watch it carefully for infestations by animals or fungi. Dust regularly.
• Steal the crown jewels. If you can. "There are contingency plans in place in event of a power failure," says a Royal Palaces spokesperson, "so the crown jewels should remain safe." Really? To preserve them properly, do nothing. A diamond is for ever.
• Invade the News of the World - it's in Wapping - and read all its secret files. Then break into M15. It's on Millbank. Read all its secret files too. Oh, no! She was murdered! I knew it!
• Go and stand on the stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Skip over the bodies of the dead actors. Re-enact the whole of Oliver!
The vital skills you will need
How to make bread
I type this in full because I want bread at The End, and I want you to have it too (should you survive). So, clear the land, turn the soil over to create furrows, take seed from any wheat growing wild, sow it 20cm apart and kick the soil over. Make sure that the birds don't eat the seed.
Stop browsing animals by hedging the field off and root out weeds. When the corn is ripe, thresh it by hitting it with a stick and mill it by rubbing it between large stones. Add the flour to water to make dough. Stick it in a pan on the fire. Result? Wholemeal flatbread!
How to make sanitary products and toilet paper
Find some sphagnum moss and use that. It is very spongy and it contains iodine, so it is slightly antiseptic.
How to eat snails
Always, always quarantine snails before eating them. Take the snail and put it where there is nothing for it to eat. Ignore its cries of hunger, leave for three days and then consume.
How to purify water
Collect the water from the purest source available, ideally a spring, minimising sediment and avoiding chemical contamination. Filter it through a sock full of sand. Sterilise the water by bringing it to a rolling boil for a few seconds.
How to clay bake a fish
Wrap the fish in large leaves, tying up the parcel with nettle stalk. Dig for clay in the earth. After combining the clay with water, cover the fish with a centimetre of clay, leaving no cracks. Scrape a shallow pit in the centre of the fire and lay the fish in it. Cover the fish with embers. After an hour, remove the fish and crack the outer shell open. The fish should be perfectly cooked.
How to remove the skin from a cow
You can kill a cow by strangulation apparently, although I have never met anyone who has done it. Or you can cut its throat, or spear it through the heart. Split the cow along its belly from the groin to the throat. Remove the internal organs. Hang the cow up by its hooves for several days to let the blood run out. Cows are heavy, so do not attempt to do this alone. To take the skin off, slide a blade or a sharp stone between the skin and the flesh. Once you have inserted the tool a little way, you can just peel the skin off.
How to shoot a deer with a bow and arrow
Deer are sensitive to human noise and smell. If you stomp through the wood with a bow and arrow you will never find one. Find out where the deer are going to be - they often walk the same way to the same place. Camouflage your scent, be quiet and do not move. When you see a deer, shoot it from 20m away. You ideally need a kill shot, eg in a lung. You don't want to hit it in the bottom, because it will run off and you won't get your dinner. TG
• Sources: Leon Durbin (Wildwood Bushcraft), Steve Dyer (Butser Ancient Farm) and Ben Jones (Merlin Archery Centre).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/29/apocalypse-survival-guide-tanya-gold
KBR Must Be Accountable for Iraq Deaths: US Senators
Published on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 by Reuters
by Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON - U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday raised concerns about the U.S. military's increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said KBR and other companies should be held accountable for the electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers and other mistakes.
[Pfc. Justin Shults shows some of the burn wounds he received after being electrocuted in a shower facility in Iraq, in this photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009 in San Antonio, Texas. Shults suffered third-degree burns on 13-percent of his body. He is suing contractor KBR Inc. for faulty wiring of the facility. (AP Photo/San Antonio Express-News, Kin Man Hui) ]Pfc. Justin Shults shows some of the burn wounds he received after being electrocuted in a shower facility in Iraq, in this photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009 in San Antonio, Texas. Shults suffered third-degree burns on 13-percent of his body. He is suing contractor KBR Inc. for faulty wiring of the facility. (AP Photo/San Antonio Express-News, Kin Man Hui)
Democratic Sens. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said the Army recently told the mother of a U.S. soldier that her son's electrocution death in Iraq was not accidental, but a "negligent homicide" by contractor KBR and two of its supervisors.
"Soldiers have died. Someone needs to be accountable for that," Dorgan told a news conference, describing the Pentagon's use of contractors in Iraq a "huge mess."
KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said the company's investigation had produced no evidence linking the company to the death of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, who died from electrocution while taking a shower at his Baghdad base.
"KBR takes exception to the senators' assertion that we have been derelict in our duties to protect the troops," she said, pledging continued cooperation with the investigation.
Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeatedly questioned Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a hearing Tuesday about the use of contractors to protect U.S. facilities in war zones.
Such work was "an inherently governmental function," he said. "It should not be performed by contractors."
Gates told the committee the U.S. military would need to continue using private contractors to provide security in Afghanistan, at least until U.S. troop levels there increased.
But he said he was creating a supervisory structure to oversee the work of private contractors in Afghanistan, based on an oversight body built up in Iraq over the past year.
"We're trying to take the lessons learned out of Iraq over the last couple of years in terms of the lack of oversight, and transfer that to Afghanistan," Gates said, adding that a broad study was underway about the use of private contractors.
He declined to comment on a report in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday which said U.S. troops had come into conflict with private security companies in Afghanistan, and some employees were taking orders from the Taliban.
Last month, five security guards who worked for North Carolina-based Blackwater, the largest security contractor in Iraq, were charged with killing 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 20 others in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that outraged Iraqis and strained U.S.-Iraqi relations.
Gates did not address the electrocution death or the Blackwater incident directly. But he said the use of contractors "grew willy-nilly in Iraq after 2003."
"All of a sudden, we had a very large number of people over there and ... as became clear, inadequate capacity to monitor them," Gates told the committee.
He said training was one area that could be done legitimately and less expensively by contractors, but there had not been any coherent strategy thus far on "what we will allow contractors to do and what we won't allow contractors to do."
Gates said the military also needed to decide what to do with large quantities of U.S. government-owned equipment now being operated by private contractors, particularly once the United States began drawing down its forces in Iraq.
"All of this is going to require a high level of supervision and I think we need to think pretty quickly and ... with some agility in the Department of Defense to make sure that we get this right," Gates said.
Dorgan and Casey said they asked Gates to meet with them and Cheryl Harris, Maseth's mother, after an Army investigator told Harris in a December email that two KBR employees and the company itself could be criminally liable for Maseth's death.
Dorgan, who heads the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, said he has chaired 18 oversight hearings on contracting abuses and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposing "billions of dollars in wasteful spending," shoddy work by private contractors, and unsafe water supplies.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-6
by Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON - U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday raised concerns about the U.S. military's increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said KBR and other companies should be held accountable for the electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers and other mistakes.
[Pfc. Justin Shults shows some of the burn wounds he received after being electrocuted in a shower facility in Iraq, in this photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009 in San Antonio, Texas. Shults suffered third-degree burns on 13-percent of his body. He is suing contractor KBR Inc. for faulty wiring of the facility. (AP Photo/San Antonio Express-News, Kin Man Hui) ]Pfc. Justin Shults shows some of the burn wounds he received after being electrocuted in a shower facility in Iraq, in this photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009 in San Antonio, Texas. Shults suffered third-degree burns on 13-percent of his body. He is suing contractor KBR Inc. for faulty wiring of the facility. (AP Photo/San Antonio Express-News, Kin Man Hui)
Democratic Sens. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said the Army recently told the mother of a U.S. soldier that her son's electrocution death in Iraq was not accidental, but a "negligent homicide" by contractor KBR and two of its supervisors.
"Soldiers have died. Someone needs to be accountable for that," Dorgan told a news conference, describing the Pentagon's use of contractors in Iraq a "huge mess."
KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said the company's investigation had produced no evidence linking the company to the death of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, who died from electrocution while taking a shower at his Baghdad base.
"KBR takes exception to the senators' assertion that we have been derelict in our duties to protect the troops," she said, pledging continued cooperation with the investigation.
Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeatedly questioned Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a hearing Tuesday about the use of contractors to protect U.S. facilities in war zones.
Such work was "an inherently governmental function," he said. "It should not be performed by contractors."
Gates told the committee the U.S. military would need to continue using private contractors to provide security in Afghanistan, at least until U.S. troop levels there increased.
But he said he was creating a supervisory structure to oversee the work of private contractors in Afghanistan, based on an oversight body built up in Iraq over the past year.
"We're trying to take the lessons learned out of Iraq over the last couple of years in terms of the lack of oversight, and transfer that to Afghanistan," Gates said, adding that a broad study was underway about the use of private contractors.
He declined to comment on a report in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday which said U.S. troops had come into conflict with private security companies in Afghanistan, and some employees were taking orders from the Taliban.
Last month, five security guards who worked for North Carolina-based Blackwater, the largest security contractor in Iraq, were charged with killing 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 20 others in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that outraged Iraqis and strained U.S.-Iraqi relations.
Gates did not address the electrocution death or the Blackwater incident directly. But he said the use of contractors "grew willy-nilly in Iraq after 2003."
"All of a sudden, we had a very large number of people over there and ... as became clear, inadequate capacity to monitor them," Gates told the committee.
He said training was one area that could be done legitimately and less expensively by contractors, but there had not been any coherent strategy thus far on "what we will allow contractors to do and what we won't allow contractors to do."
Gates said the military also needed to decide what to do with large quantities of U.S. government-owned equipment now being operated by private contractors, particularly once the United States began drawing down its forces in Iraq.
"All of this is going to require a high level of supervision and I think we need to think pretty quickly and ... with some agility in the Department of Defense to make sure that we get this right," Gates said.
Dorgan and Casey said they asked Gates to meet with them and Cheryl Harris, Maseth's mother, after an Army investigator told Harris in a December email that two KBR employees and the company itself could be criminally liable for Maseth's death.
Dorgan, who heads the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, said he has chaired 18 oversight hearings on contracting abuses and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposing "billions of dollars in wasteful spending," shoddy work by private contractors, and unsafe water supplies.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-6
California prepares to stop paying bills
Come Feb. 1, tax refunds, welfare checks replaced with IOUs
Posted: January 26, 2009
9:47 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
California State Controller John Chiang
The state of California has run out of money.
Facing a $42 billion budget deficit, State Controller John Chiang told the Sacramento Bee he has already borrowed $21.5 billion to try to cover the state's checks, but by Feb. 1, there will be no more options left but to simply stop paying some of the bills – including tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owned to California citizens.
"It pains me to pull this trigger," Chiang said at a news conference held in his office. "But it is an action that is critically necessary."
Federal law requires that many school and healthcare programs – a total of about $6.6 billion in California – must be paid, the Los Angeles Times reports, so Chiang has announced an expected payment freeze on $3.7 billion worth of the state's bills, most of it refunds owed to taxpayers.
But even with the freeze beginning next week, the Times reports, California will still fall $346 million short for the month of February, forcing Chiang to consider something only done once since the Great Depression: issuing IOUs.
Formally called "registered warrants," the state's IOUs consist of little more than a piece of paper that says the state owes a payee money, plus interest, to be paid at some point in the future.
The last time California issued registered warrants was in 1992, during two-month budget battle between then-Gov. Pete Wilson and the state's legislators. But after the state issued almost $4 billion worth of IOUs, many banks stopped accepting them as deposits, claiming the five percent interest didn't pay for the hassle of processing them.
The Times reports that state officials have already designed an IOU template for February and begun negotiating with banks to avoid a repeat of 1992's problems.
Beth Mills, a spokeswoman for the California Bankers Association, however, told the Bee that the group's members still have "a lot of technical and operational questions we're trying to get some resolution on" about IOUs.
For now, state officials are hoping that Chiang's promised payment freezes can delay the budget crisis long enough for Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to find a solution.
Among the $3.7 billion in payments Chiang has targeted to freeze include $1.91 billion in personal income tax refunds, $205 million in court operations, $122 million scheduled to help counties with welfare administration, $13 million in student aid
and over $700 million in aid to various disabled and needy groups.
State officials also got a glimmer of hope last week when they learned that more than $11 billion of President Obama's $825 billion economic stimulus plan may land in California's coffers.
"This takes a big bite out of the state's budget gap," Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, told the Times. "It is better news than many of us had anticipated."
Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, however, warned that lawmakers can't rely on Washington to fix the problem.
"We have to make really horrible cuts, and we have to raise revenue," Bass told the Times. "We are just hoping whatever we get will help us avoid deeper cuts."
If the cuts aren't deep enough, California may be forced to consider issuing the IOUs. Continued borrowing, Chiang said, is not an option.
"We are the eighth largest economy," Chiang said, speaking of California's rank among the world's nations, were it an independent country. But comparing it to other states, he said, "We have the 50th or we are tied for last in the credit ratings. We are a world economic power, but we have fiscal mismanagement in this state."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/?pageId=87175
Posted: January 26, 2009
9:47 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
California State Controller John Chiang
The state of California has run out of money.
Facing a $42 billion budget deficit, State Controller John Chiang told the Sacramento Bee he has already borrowed $21.5 billion to try to cover the state's checks, but by Feb. 1, there will be no more options left but to simply stop paying some of the bills – including tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owned to California citizens.
"It pains me to pull this trigger," Chiang said at a news conference held in his office. "But it is an action that is critically necessary."
Federal law requires that many school and healthcare programs – a total of about $6.6 billion in California – must be paid, the Los Angeles Times reports, so Chiang has announced an expected payment freeze on $3.7 billion worth of the state's bills, most of it refunds owed to taxpayers.
But even with the freeze beginning next week, the Times reports, California will still fall $346 million short for the month of February, forcing Chiang to consider something only done once since the Great Depression: issuing IOUs.
Formally called "registered warrants," the state's IOUs consist of little more than a piece of paper that says the state owes a payee money, plus interest, to be paid at some point in the future.
The last time California issued registered warrants was in 1992, during two-month budget battle between then-Gov. Pete Wilson and the state's legislators. But after the state issued almost $4 billion worth of IOUs, many banks stopped accepting them as deposits, claiming the five percent interest didn't pay for the hassle of processing them.
The Times reports that state officials have already designed an IOU template for February and begun negotiating with banks to avoid a repeat of 1992's problems.
Beth Mills, a spokeswoman for the California Bankers Association, however, told the Bee that the group's members still have "a lot of technical and operational questions we're trying to get some resolution on" about IOUs.
For now, state officials are hoping that Chiang's promised payment freezes can delay the budget crisis long enough for Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Legislature to find a solution.
Among the $3.7 billion in payments Chiang has targeted to freeze include $1.91 billion in personal income tax refunds, $205 million in court operations, $122 million scheduled to help counties with welfare administration, $13 million in student aid
and over $700 million in aid to various disabled and needy groups.
State officials also got a glimmer of hope last week when they learned that more than $11 billion of President Obama's $825 billion economic stimulus plan may land in California's coffers.
"This takes a big bite out of the state's budget gap," Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, told the Times. "It is better news than many of us had anticipated."
Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, however, warned that lawmakers can't rely on Washington to fix the problem.
"We have to make really horrible cuts, and we have to raise revenue," Bass told the Times. "We are just hoping whatever we get will help us avoid deeper cuts."
If the cuts aren't deep enough, California may be forced to consider issuing the IOUs. Continued borrowing, Chiang said, is not an option.
"We are the eighth largest economy," Chiang said, speaking of California's rank among the world's nations, were it an independent country. But comparing it to other states, he said, "We have the 50th or we are tied for last in the credit ratings. We are a world economic power, but we have fiscal mismanagement in this state."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/?pageId=87175
Is It Time to Bail Out of the US?
By Paul Craig Roberts
January 28, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California’s bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.
Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.
A person might think that California’s plight would introduce some realism into Washington, DC, but it has not. President Obama is taking steps to intensify the war in Afghanistan and, perhaps, to expand it to Pakistan.
Obama has retained the Republican warmongers in the Pentagon, and the US continues to illegally bomb Pakistan and to murder its civilians. At the World Economic Forum at Davos this week, Pakistan’s prime minister, Y. R. Gilani, said that the American attacks on Pakistan are counterproductive and done without Pakistan’s permission. In an interview with CNN, Gilani said: “I want to put on record that we do not have any agreement between the government of the United States and the government of Pakistan.”
How long before Washington will be printing money?
On January 28 Obama announced his $825 billion bailout plan. This comes on top of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout of just a few months ago.
Obama says his plan will be more transparent than Bush’s and will do more good for the economy.
As large as the bailouts are--a total of $1.5 trillion in four months--the amount is small in relation to the reported size of troubled assets that are in the tens of trillions of dollars. How do we know that by June there won’t be another bailout, say $950 billion?
Where will the money come from?
Obama’s bailout plan, added to the FY 2009 budget deficit he has inherited from Bush, opens a gaping expenditure hole of about $3 trillion.
Who is going to purchase $3 trillion of US Treasury bonds?
Not the US consumer. The consumer is out of work and out of money. Private sector credit market debt is 174% of GDP. The personal savings rate is 2 percent. Ten percent of households are in foreclosure or arrears. Household debt-service ratio is at an all-time high. Household net worth has declined at a record rate. Housing inventories are at record highs.
Not America’s foreign creditors. At best, the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis can recycle their trade surpluses with the US into Treasury bonds, but the combined surplus does not approach the size of the US budget deficit.
Perhaps another drop in the stock market will drive Americans’ remaining wealth into “safe” US Treasury bonds.
If not, there’s only the printing press.
The printing press would turn a deflationary depression into an inflationary depression.
Unemployment combined with rising prices would be a killer.
Inflation would kill the dollar as well, leaving the US unable to pay for its imports.
All the Obama regime sees is a “credit problem.” But the crisis goes far beyond banks’ bad investments. The United States is busted. Many of the state governments are busted. Homeowners are busted. Consumers are busted. Jobs are busted. Companies are busted.
And Obama thinks he has the money to fight wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Except for the superrich and those banksters and CEOs who stole wealth from investors and shareholders, Americans have suffered enormous losses in wealth and income.
The stock market decline has destroyed about 45% of their IRAs, 401Ks, and other equity investments. On top of this comes the decline in home prices, lost jobs and health care, lost customers. The realized gains in mutual funds and investment partnerships, on which Americans paid taxes, have been wiped out.
The government should give those taxes back.
Americans who have seen their retirement savings devastated by complicity of government regulators and lawmakers with financial gangsters should not have to pay
any income tax when they draw on their pensions.
The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington “protected” us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the US economy collapsed.
How can President Obama even think about fighting wars half way around the world while California cannot pay its bills, while Americans are being turned out of their homes, while, as Business Week reports, retirees will work throughout their retirement (which assumes that there will be jobs), while careers are being destroyed and stores and factories shuttered.
Americans are facing tremendous unemployment and hardship. Obama doesn’t have another dollar to spend on Bush’s wars.
Taxpayers are busted. They cannot stand another day of being milked by the military-security complex. The US government is paying private mercenaries more by the day than the monthly checks it is providing to Social Security retirees.
This is insanity.
The banksters robbed us twice. First it was our home and stock values. Then the government rewarded the banksters for their misdeeds by bailing out the banksters, not their victims, and putting the cost on the taxpayers’ books.
The government has also robbed the taxpayers of $3 trillion dollars to fight its wars. About $600 billion are out of pocket costs, and the rest is on the taxpayers’ books.
When foreign creditors look at the debt piled on the taxpayers’ books, they don’t see a good credit risk.
Washington is so accustomed to ripping off the taxpayers for the benefit of special interests that the practice is now in the DNA. While bailouts are being piled upon bailouts, wars are being piled upon wars.
Before Obama gets in any deeper, he must ask his economic team where the money is coming from. When he finds out, he needs to tell the rest of us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21867.htm
January 28, 2009 "Information Clearinghouse" -- California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California’s bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.
Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.
A person might think that California’s plight would introduce some realism into Washington, DC, but it has not. President Obama is taking steps to intensify the war in Afghanistan and, perhaps, to expand it to Pakistan.
Obama has retained the Republican warmongers in the Pentagon, and the US continues to illegally bomb Pakistan and to murder its civilians. At the World Economic Forum at Davos this week, Pakistan’s prime minister, Y. R. Gilani, said that the American attacks on Pakistan are counterproductive and done without Pakistan’s permission. In an interview with CNN, Gilani said: “I want to put on record that we do not have any agreement between the government of the United States and the government of Pakistan.”
How long before Washington will be printing money?
On January 28 Obama announced his $825 billion bailout plan. This comes on top of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout of just a few months ago.
Obama says his plan will be more transparent than Bush’s and will do more good for the economy.
As large as the bailouts are--a total of $1.5 trillion in four months--the amount is small in relation to the reported size of troubled assets that are in the tens of trillions of dollars. How do we know that by June there won’t be another bailout, say $950 billion?
Where will the money come from?
Obama’s bailout plan, added to the FY 2009 budget deficit he has inherited from Bush, opens a gaping expenditure hole of about $3 trillion.
Who is going to purchase $3 trillion of US Treasury bonds?
Not the US consumer. The consumer is out of work and out of money. Private sector credit market debt is 174% of GDP. The personal savings rate is 2 percent. Ten percent of households are in foreclosure or arrears. Household debt-service ratio is at an all-time high. Household net worth has declined at a record rate. Housing inventories are at record highs.
Not America’s foreign creditors. At best, the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis can recycle their trade surpluses with the US into Treasury bonds, but the combined surplus does not approach the size of the US budget deficit.
Perhaps another drop in the stock market will drive Americans’ remaining wealth into “safe” US Treasury bonds.
If not, there’s only the printing press.
The printing press would turn a deflationary depression into an inflationary depression.
Unemployment combined with rising prices would be a killer.
Inflation would kill the dollar as well, leaving the US unable to pay for its imports.
All the Obama regime sees is a “credit problem.” But the crisis goes far beyond banks’ bad investments. The United States is busted. Many of the state governments are busted. Homeowners are busted. Consumers are busted. Jobs are busted. Companies are busted.
And Obama thinks he has the money to fight wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Except for the superrich and those banksters and CEOs who stole wealth from investors and shareholders, Americans have suffered enormous losses in wealth and income.
The stock market decline has destroyed about 45% of their IRAs, 401Ks, and other equity investments. On top of this comes the decline in home prices, lost jobs and health care, lost customers. The realized gains in mutual funds and investment partnerships, on which Americans paid taxes, have been wiped out.
The government should give those taxes back.
Americans who have seen their retirement savings devastated by complicity of government regulators and lawmakers with financial gangsters should not have to pay
any income tax when they draw on their pensions.
The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington “protected” us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the US economy collapsed.
How can President Obama even think about fighting wars half way around the world while California cannot pay its bills, while Americans are being turned out of their homes, while, as Business Week reports, retirees will work throughout their retirement (which assumes that there will be jobs), while careers are being destroyed and stores and factories shuttered.
Americans are facing tremendous unemployment and hardship. Obama doesn’t have another dollar to spend on Bush’s wars.
Taxpayers are busted. They cannot stand another day of being milked by the military-security complex. The US government is paying private mercenaries more by the day than the monthly checks it is providing to Social Security retirees.
This is insanity.
The banksters robbed us twice. First it was our home and stock values. Then the government rewarded the banksters for their misdeeds by bailing out the banksters, not their victims, and putting the cost on the taxpayers’ books.
The government has also robbed the taxpayers of $3 trillion dollars to fight its wars. About $600 billion are out of pocket costs, and the rest is on the taxpayers’ books.
When foreign creditors look at the debt piled on the taxpayers’ books, they don’t see a good credit risk.
Washington is so accustomed to ripping off the taxpayers for the benefit of special interests that the practice is now in the DNA. While bailouts are being piled upon bailouts, wars are being piled upon wars.
Before Obama gets in any deeper, he must ask his economic team where the money is coming from. When he finds out, he needs to tell the rest of us.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21867.htm
Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?
By Robert Jensen, AlterNet
Posted on January 29, 2009, Printed on January 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/122822/
As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation's economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature's economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.
"We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what's in the bank," said Jackson, president of the Land Institute. "If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won't much matter."
Jackson doesn't minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a "50-year farm bill," which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month.
Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as a environmental studies professor at California State University, Sacramento.
Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at the Land Institute continue their work on natural systems agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.
Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why the call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?
Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.
We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills -- laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years -- that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.
RJ: What are some of the key aspects of a long-term solution?
WJ: Support for soil conservation and protecting water resources have to be central. There needs to be funding for research on a different model for agriculture. And we have to avoid wasting any more resources on biofuels made from annual crops, especially corn, which is certain to exacerbate soil erosion, chemical contamination and a larger dead zone in the gulf.
RJ: But it is true that most people, including those in the new administration, are focused on short-term problems in the financial and industrial economy. Is there any chance people -- especially people in an overwhelmingly urban nation -- will pay attention right now?
WJ: Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it's clear that we don't really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, overconsumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year bill is sensible right now.
RJ: What would such a 50-year plan look like? What are the key features?
WJ: We start by acknowledging the necessity of moving from an extractive, unsustainable economy to one that is renewable and sustainable, and the first place to look is to the production of the most basic commodity -- food. Once we face that necessity, we move to examining the possibilities for achieving this, recognizing that we have to act now while we still have slack, some room to move. Here's a sobering thought: If we don't achieve this sustainability first in agriculture, it's highly unlikely we will in any other sector of the economy and society. That's what makes this so imperative.
RJ: OK, start with the necessity: How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?
WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago, humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon -- the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil's carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil and natural gas. But through all that, we've continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That's the basic problem of agriculture.
Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil and it is more degraded. We've masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals -- pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that "solution" is no solution and is, in fact, part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.
RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?
WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem -- we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.
RJ: OK, so organic alone isn't the answer. Isn't that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?
WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn't offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.
RJ: So, where does that leave us?
WJ: Let's go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell [Berry] says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At the Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.
RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?
WJ: First, let's recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there's increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.
At the Land Institute, we've been working on perennializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.
RJ: Let's assume that natural systems agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis -- some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?
WJ: You're right that it's not just about plants and science; it's also about people and society. We think that protecting the soil is not only an ecological imperative but an opportunity for positive economic and cultural change as well. The proposals we're discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture -- sustainable farming will require more "eyes per acre," and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the "sweat of the brow" amid "thistles and thorns." This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.
We're seeing that on a small scale now, with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they're also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future.
RJ: How would a farm bill that you and Wendell might write differ from what we see today?
WJ: The farm bills we've had largely address exports, commodity problems, subsidies and food programs. They all involve here-and-now concerns. A 50-year farm bill represents a vision that stresses the need to protect soil from erosion, cut the wastefulness of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxins in soil and water, manage carefully the nitrogen of the soil, reduce dead zones, restore an agrarian way of life and preserve farmland from development. The best way to accomplish most of these goals is to gradually increase the number of acres with perennial vegetation, first of all through rotations and increase in the number of grass-fed dairies sprinkled about the countryside, and second, through progress toward perennializing the major crops. A good bill could help farmers accomplish those things.
RJ: It's also likely that many people reading this will dismiss you as idealistic, as unrealistic. How would you answer that?
WJ: These are the same people who believe it's realistic to continue practices they know to be unsustainable. The basic choice is simple: Do we want to work at coming up with a system that can produce healthful food and healthy communities, one that is economically and ecologically viable? Or do we want to continue to contaminate our soil and water as we watch that soil continue to be eroded by that water? That contamination and erosion are both material reality and metaphor for our cultural and economic condition.
Look, I'm a scientist from the countryside, which means I have spent my life dealing with reality in research and on the farm. These are necessary and possible goals. Without the necessity, it may be considered grandiose. Without the possibility, it could be regarded as grandiose. The test for grandiosity, in my view, fails. As a nation, we are blessed with some of the world's best soils. Increasingly, city people want healthier and safer food. And we're at a political moment when everybody and his dog is talking about the need for change. So, let's get to it.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas, Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/122822/
Posted on January 29, 2009, Printed on January 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/122822/
As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation's economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature's economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.
"We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what's in the bank," said Jackson, president of the Land Institute. "If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won't much matter."
Jackson doesn't minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a "50-year farm bill," which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month.
Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as a environmental studies professor at California State University, Sacramento.
Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at the Land Institute continue their work on natural systems agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.
Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why the call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?
Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.
We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills -- laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years -- that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.
RJ: What are some of the key aspects of a long-term solution?
WJ: Support for soil conservation and protecting water resources have to be central. There needs to be funding for research on a different model for agriculture. And we have to avoid wasting any more resources on biofuels made from annual crops, especially corn, which is certain to exacerbate soil erosion, chemical contamination and a larger dead zone in the gulf.
RJ: But it is true that most people, including those in the new administration, are focused on short-term problems in the financial and industrial economy. Is there any chance people -- especially people in an overwhelmingly urban nation -- will pay attention right now?
WJ: Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it's clear that we don't really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, overconsumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year bill is sensible right now.
RJ: What would such a 50-year plan look like? What are the key features?
WJ: We start by acknowledging the necessity of moving from an extractive, unsustainable economy to one that is renewable and sustainable, and the first place to look is to the production of the most basic commodity -- food. Once we face that necessity, we move to examining the possibilities for achieving this, recognizing that we have to act now while we still have slack, some room to move. Here's a sobering thought: If we don't achieve this sustainability first in agriculture, it's highly unlikely we will in any other sector of the economy and society. That's what makes this so imperative.
RJ: OK, start with the necessity: How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?
WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago, humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon -- the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil's carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil and natural gas. But through all that, we've continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That's the basic problem of agriculture.
Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil and it is more degraded. We've masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals -- pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that "solution" is no solution and is, in fact, part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.
RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?
WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem -- we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.
RJ: OK, so organic alone isn't the answer. Isn't that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?
WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn't offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.
RJ: So, where does that leave us?
WJ: Let's go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell [Berry] says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At the Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.
RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?
WJ: First, let's recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there's increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.
At the Land Institute, we've been working on perennializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.
RJ: Let's assume that natural systems agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis -- some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?
WJ: You're right that it's not just about plants and science; it's also about people and society. We think that protecting the soil is not only an ecological imperative but an opportunity for positive economic and cultural change as well. The proposals we're discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture -- sustainable farming will require more "eyes per acre," and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the "sweat of the brow" amid "thistles and thorns." This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.
We're seeing that on a small scale now, with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they're also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future.
RJ: How would a farm bill that you and Wendell might write differ from what we see today?
WJ: The farm bills we've had largely address exports, commodity problems, subsidies and food programs. They all involve here-and-now concerns. A 50-year farm bill represents a vision that stresses the need to protect soil from erosion, cut the wastefulness of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxins in soil and water, manage carefully the nitrogen of the soil, reduce dead zones, restore an agrarian way of life and preserve farmland from development. The best way to accomplish most of these goals is to gradually increase the number of acres with perennial vegetation, first of all through rotations and increase in the number of grass-fed dairies sprinkled about the countryside, and second, through progress toward perennializing the major crops. A good bill could help farmers accomplish those things.
RJ: It's also likely that many people reading this will dismiss you as idealistic, as unrealistic. How would you answer that?
WJ: These are the same people who believe it's realistic to continue practices they know to be unsustainable. The basic choice is simple: Do we want to work at coming up with a system that can produce healthful food and healthy communities, one that is economically and ecologically viable? Or do we want to continue to contaminate our soil and water as we watch that soil continue to be eroded by that water? That contamination and erosion are both material reality and metaphor for our cultural and economic condition.
Look, I'm a scientist from the countryside, which means I have spent my life dealing with reality in research and on the farm. These are necessary and possible goals. Without the necessity, it may be considered grandiose. Without the possibility, it could be regarded as grandiose. The test for grandiosity, in my view, fails. As a nation, we are blessed with some of the world's best soils. Increasingly, city people want healthier and safer food. And we're at a political moment when everybody and his dog is talking about the need for change. So, let's get to it.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas, Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/122822/
Berlusconi criticized over rape comments
Posted on Sun, Jan. 25, 2009
The Associated Press
Premier Silvio Berlusconi sparked outrage Sunday for suggesting that Italy's women were so beautiful they needed military escorts to avoid being raped.
Berlusconi made the comments in response to questions about his proposal to deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets to fight crime. A series of violent attacks, including a rape in Rome on New Year's Eve and another outside the capital this week, have put pressure on the government to crack down on crime.
But Berlusconi said that, even in a militarized state, crimes like rape can happen. "You can't consider deploying a force that would be sufficient to prevent the risk," the ANSA and Apcom news agencies quoted him as saying. "We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful."
Opposition lawmakers denounced the comments.
Giovanna Melandri of the opposition Democratic Party said Berlusconi's comments were "profoundly offensive," saying the pain of rape could never be joked about in such a way.
Berlusconi, in an effort to explain himself, said he was complimenting Italian women "because there are only about 100,000 people in law enforcement, while there are millions of beautiful women."
He stressed that rape was a serious and "disgraceful" crime. But he added that people should never forget a sense of "levity and good humor" whenever his comments are concerned.
Berlusconi, a billionaire media-mogul-turned politician, has a history of gaffes. He courted controversy when he compared a German politician to a Nazi camp guard and when he said, shortly after 9/11, that Western civilization was superior to Islam.
http://www.kansascity.com/451/v-print/story/1000429.html
The Associated Press
Premier Silvio Berlusconi sparked outrage Sunday for suggesting that Italy's women were so beautiful they needed military escorts to avoid being raped.
Berlusconi made the comments in response to questions about his proposal to deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets to fight crime. A series of violent attacks, including a rape in Rome on New Year's Eve and another outside the capital this week, have put pressure on the government to crack down on crime.
But Berlusconi said that, even in a militarized state, crimes like rape can happen. "You can't consider deploying a force that would be sufficient to prevent the risk," the ANSA and Apcom news agencies quoted him as saying. "We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful."
Opposition lawmakers denounced the comments.
Giovanna Melandri of the opposition Democratic Party said Berlusconi's comments were "profoundly offensive," saying the pain of rape could never be joked about in such a way.
Berlusconi, in an effort to explain himself, said he was complimenting Italian women "because there are only about 100,000 people in law enforcement, while there are millions of beautiful women."
He stressed that rape was a serious and "disgraceful" crime. But he added that people should never forget a sense of "levity and good humor" whenever his comments are concerned.
Berlusconi, a billionaire media-mogul-turned politician, has a history of gaffes. He courted controversy when he compared a German politician to a Nazi camp guard and when he said, shortly after 9/11, that Western civilization was superior to Islam.
http://www.kansascity.com/451/v-print/story/1000429.html
French strike nationwide over economic crisis
Thu Jan 29, 2009 6:37am EST
By Estelle Shirbon
PARIS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of French workers staged a nationwide strike on Thursday to try to force President Nicolas Sarkozy and business leaders to do more to protect jobs and wages during the economic crisis.
The strike, in a country with a strong protest culture, aimed to highlight fears over growing unemployment, discontent over Sarkozy's reluctance to help consumers and resentment toward bankers blamed for the economic slump.
It was the first such protest linked to the slump in a major industrialized nation and was backed by the majority of French voters, according to opinion polls.
It did not however paralyze activity as past strikes in France have done. The "black Thursday" announced by media beforehand did not quite materialize.
One in three schoolteachers and one in four staffers at the post office and the electricity company EDF walked off the job, and participation was high in many parts of the public transport network with erratic train, tram and bus services.
The strike cut 11,000 megawatts in power capacity, unions said, but EDF said supplies to customers would not be disrupted.
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE50S1MX20090129
By Estelle Shirbon
PARIS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of French workers staged a nationwide strike on Thursday to try to force President Nicolas Sarkozy and business leaders to do more to protect jobs and wages during the economic crisis.
The strike, in a country with a strong protest culture, aimed to highlight fears over growing unemployment, discontent over Sarkozy's reluctance to help consumers and resentment toward bankers blamed for the economic slump.
It was the first such protest linked to the slump in a major industrialized nation and was backed by the majority of French voters, according to opinion polls.
It did not however paralyze activity as past strikes in France have done. The "black Thursday" announced by media beforehand did not quite materialize.
One in three schoolteachers and one in four staffers at the post office and the electricity company EDF walked off the job, and participation was high in many parts of the public transport network with erratic train, tram and bus services.
The strike cut 11,000 megawatts in power capacity, unions said, but EDF said supplies to customers would not be disrupted.
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE50S1MX20090129
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
More than a million wait in icy darkness across US
By DANIEL SHEA, Associated Press Writer Daniel Shea, Associated Press Writer 7 mins ago
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Well over a million people shivered in ice-bound homes across the country Wednesday, waiting for warmer weather and for utility crews to restring power lines brought down by a storm that killed 23 as it took a snowy, icy journey from the Southern Plains to the East Coast.
But with temperatures plunging, utility officials warned that it could be mid-February before electricity is restored to some of the hardest-hit places. The worst of the power failures were in Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio.
Just getting to their source was difficult for utility crews. Ice-encrusted tree limbs and power lines blocked glazed roads, and cracking limbs pierced the air like popping gunfire as they snapped.
On Wednesday night, President Barack Obama declared federal emergencies in Arkansas and Kentucky, clearing the way for the two states to receive federal aid.
In Kentucky, National Guard soldiers were dispatched to remove the debris. Oklahoma, already struggling to restore power there, planned to send crews to help in Arkansas later in the week.
"It looks like a tornado came through, but there wasn't a path; it was everywhere," said Mel Coleman, the chief executive officer of the North Arkansas Electric Cooperative in Salem. The power is out at his house, too, and he spent Tuesday night in a chair at his office.
The storm was "worse than we ever imagined," he said.
In Arkansas — where ice was 3 inches thick in some places — people huddled next to fireplaces, wood-burning stoves and portable heaters powered by generators. When it got too cold, they left for shelters or relatives' homes that weren't hit as badly.
"We bundled up together on a bed with four blankets. It's freezing," said Pearl Schmidt of Paintsville, in eastern Kentucky. Her family endured 32-degree weather Wednesday morning before leaving their house for a shelter.
Kyle Brashears' family rode out the storm in their Mountain Home, Ark., home before fleeing to relatives after half an ice-caked oak tree fell into their home.
"It caved the roof in and ripped the gutter off, although it didn't penetrate inside," he said. "I was walking around outside until about 1 a.m. and it was just a nonstop medley of tree limbs cracking off."
The number of homes and businesses without power totaled around 1.3 million Wednesday evening, in a swath of states from Oklahoma to West Virginia. Arkansas had more than 350,000 customers in the dark; Kentucky had about a half-million. The actual number of people affected the power failures could be much higher.
In Kentucky, the power outages produced by the ice storm were outdone only by the remnants of Hurricane Ike, which lashed the state with fierce winds last year, leaving about 600,000 customers without power. Gov. Steve Beshear said he was seeking a federal emergency disaster declaration, a key step in securing federal assitance for storm victims.
"We've got lots of counties that do not have any communication, any heat, any power," he said.
Various charities opened shelters across the region, but with the power out nearly everywhere — including at some radio stations — it was difficult to spread the word. Some deputies went door to door and offered to drive the elderly to safety.
Meanwhile, some community leaders buckled down for a long haul. Kentucky Public Protection Cabinet spokesman Dick Brown urged people to conserve water because power failures could limit supplies in some areas.
Since the storm began building Monday, the weather has been blamed for at least six deaths in Texas, four in Arkansas, three in Virginia, six in Missouri, two in Oklahoma, and one each in Indiana and Ohio. Some parts of New England were expected to see well over a foot of snow as the storm kept moving northeast, but because it turned to snow, ice-related power failures weren't as big of a concern.
That didn't mean a trouble-free day for commuters. Delays or cancellations were reported at airports including those serving Columbus, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Commuters on highways encountered a slushy mess.
Tracey Ramey of Waynesville, Ohio, a village about 20 miles southeast of Dayton, said her husband left for his job as a plow operator late Monday with an overnight bag and hasn't been able to return. He did call her Wednesday morning to caution her not to go to her data-entry job.
"He said, 'There's 2 inches of ice on the road and there's no way you're going to make it to work,'" she said.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio; Justin Juozapavicius in Tulsa, Okla.; Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky.; Rick Callahan in Indianapolis; Ben Feller in Washington; Ben Greene in Baltimore; Dan Sewell in Cincinnati; and John Raby in Charleston, W.Va.; and Patrick Walters in Philadelphia.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_re_us/winter_storm/print
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Well over a million people shivered in ice-bound homes across the country Wednesday, waiting for warmer weather and for utility crews to restring power lines brought down by a storm that killed 23 as it took a snowy, icy journey from the Southern Plains to the East Coast.
But with temperatures plunging, utility officials warned that it could be mid-February before electricity is restored to some of the hardest-hit places. The worst of the power failures were in Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio.
Just getting to their source was difficult for utility crews. Ice-encrusted tree limbs and power lines blocked glazed roads, and cracking limbs pierced the air like popping gunfire as they snapped.
On Wednesday night, President Barack Obama declared federal emergencies in Arkansas and Kentucky, clearing the way for the two states to receive federal aid.
In Kentucky, National Guard soldiers were dispatched to remove the debris. Oklahoma, already struggling to restore power there, planned to send crews to help in Arkansas later in the week.
"It looks like a tornado came through, but there wasn't a path; it was everywhere," said Mel Coleman, the chief executive officer of the North Arkansas Electric Cooperative in Salem. The power is out at his house, too, and he spent Tuesday night in a chair at his office.
The storm was "worse than we ever imagined," he said.
In Arkansas — where ice was 3 inches thick in some places — people huddled next to fireplaces, wood-burning stoves and portable heaters powered by generators. When it got too cold, they left for shelters or relatives' homes that weren't hit as badly.
"We bundled up together on a bed with four blankets. It's freezing," said Pearl Schmidt of Paintsville, in eastern Kentucky. Her family endured 32-degree weather Wednesday morning before leaving their house for a shelter.
Kyle Brashears' family rode out the storm in their Mountain Home, Ark., home before fleeing to relatives after half an ice-caked oak tree fell into their home.
"It caved the roof in and ripped the gutter off, although it didn't penetrate inside," he said. "I was walking around outside until about 1 a.m. and it was just a nonstop medley of tree limbs cracking off."
The number of homes and businesses without power totaled around 1.3 million Wednesday evening, in a swath of states from Oklahoma to West Virginia. Arkansas had more than 350,000 customers in the dark; Kentucky had about a half-million. The actual number of people affected the power failures could be much higher.
In Kentucky, the power outages produced by the ice storm were outdone only by the remnants of Hurricane Ike, which lashed the state with fierce winds last year, leaving about 600,000 customers without power. Gov. Steve Beshear said he was seeking a federal emergency disaster declaration, a key step in securing federal assitance for storm victims.
"We've got lots of counties that do not have any communication, any heat, any power," he said.
Various charities opened shelters across the region, but with the power out nearly everywhere — including at some radio stations — it was difficult to spread the word. Some deputies went door to door and offered to drive the elderly to safety.
Meanwhile, some community leaders buckled down for a long haul. Kentucky Public Protection Cabinet spokesman Dick Brown urged people to conserve water because power failures could limit supplies in some areas.
Since the storm began building Monday, the weather has been blamed for at least six deaths in Texas, four in Arkansas, three in Virginia, six in Missouri, two in Oklahoma, and one each in Indiana and Ohio. Some parts of New England were expected to see well over a foot of snow as the storm kept moving northeast, but because it turned to snow, ice-related power failures weren't as big of a concern.
That didn't mean a trouble-free day for commuters. Delays or cancellations were reported at airports including those serving Columbus, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Commuters on highways encountered a slushy mess.
Tracey Ramey of Waynesville, Ohio, a village about 20 miles southeast of Dayton, said her husband left for his job as a plow operator late Monday with an overnight bag and hasn't been able to return. He did call her Wednesday morning to caution her not to go to her data-entry job.
"He said, 'There's 2 inches of ice on the road and there's no way you're going to make it to work,'" she said.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio; Justin Juozapavicius in Tulsa, Okla.; Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky.; Rick Callahan in Indianapolis; Ben Feller in Washington; Ben Greene in Baltimore; Dan Sewell in Cincinnati; and John Raby in Charleston, W.Va.; and Patrick Walters in Philadelphia.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_re_us/winter_storm/print
ACLU Tests Obama With Request for Secret Bush-Era Memos
Published on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 by the McClatchy Newspapers
by Marisa Taylor
WASHINGTON — Dozens of secret documents justifying the Bush administration's spying and interrogation programs could see the light of day because of a new presidential directive.
The American Civil Liberties Union asked the Obama administration on Wednesday to release Justice Department memos that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations, eavesdropping and secret prisons.
For years, the Bush administration refused to release them, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government's deliberative process.
The ACLU's request, however, comes after President Barack Obama last week rescinded a 2001 Justice Department memo that gave agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests. Obama also urged agencies to be more transparent when deciding what documents to release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The ACLU now sees a new opening.
"The president has made a very visible and clear commitment to transparency," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "We're eager to see that put into practice."
The collection of memos, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, are viewed as the missing puzzle pieces that could help explain the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies.
Critics of the prior administration also see the release of the documents as necessary to determine whether former administration officials should be held accountable for legal opinions that justified various antiterrorism measures, including the use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
Attorney General nominee Eric Holder recently denounced waterboarding as torture, but details about how the method was used have remained secret.
"We don't have anything resembling a full picture of what happened over the last eight years and on what grounds the Bush administration believed it could order such methods," Jaffer said. "We think the OLC memos are really central to that narrative."
Even though some key memos have been released or leaked to the media, at least 50 memos remain secret, Jaffer said, including a dozen memos related to the warrantless wiretapping program.
In one case, the ACLU found out about a memo because it was cited in a footnote. The government has refused to elaborate on the 2002 document, other than to describe it as a discussion of the Fourth Amendment's application to domestic military operations.
Jaffer said that it could reveal whether the Justice Department was advising the National Security Agency that the Fourth Amendment didn't apply to its eavesdropping program, but he's not certain. The amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
"There are about a dozen memos where we just have one or two lines about the subject matter and that's it," he said. "When you put it all together you realize how much is still being held secret."
The ACLU originally sought the documents by filing a series of lawsuits under FOIA.
Federal judges have ordered the release of some records, including thousands of pages documenting the FBI's concerns about the interrogation program.
The Bush administration, however, fought the release of most of the records.
In September 2007, U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy rejected the government's claim of secrecy and ordered the Justice Department to submit surveillance documents for his review.
The ACLU has asked another judge to find CIA officials in contempt after revelations that videotapes of CIA interrogations had been destroyed. A criminal investigation is ongoing.
Since Obama's directive on disclosure, Melanie Ann Pustay, the director of Justice's Office of Information and Privacy, instructed federal officials that they should process requests for records with a "clear presumption in favor of disclosure, to resolve doubts in favor of openness, and to not withhold information based on 'speculative or abstract fears.'"
In another indication that the ACLU may get its way, the nominee to head the OLC, Dawn Johnsen, has previously indicated she thinks that such memos should generally be released.
Before her nomination, Johnsen wrote in an article for Slate, the internet magazine, that the central question in the debate was whether OLC could issue "binding legal opinions that in essence tell the president and the executive branch that they need not comply with existing laws — and then not share those opinions and that legal reasoning with Congress or the American people? I would submit that clearly the answer to that question must be no."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-1
by Marisa Taylor
WASHINGTON — Dozens of secret documents justifying the Bush administration's spying and interrogation programs could see the light of day because of a new presidential directive.
The American Civil Liberties Union asked the Obama administration on Wednesday to release Justice Department memos that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations, eavesdropping and secret prisons.
For years, the Bush administration refused to release them, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government's deliberative process.
The ACLU's request, however, comes after President Barack Obama last week rescinded a 2001 Justice Department memo that gave agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests. Obama also urged agencies to be more transparent when deciding what documents to release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The ACLU now sees a new opening.
"The president has made a very visible and clear commitment to transparency," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "We're eager to see that put into practice."
The collection of memos, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, are viewed as the missing puzzle pieces that could help explain the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies.
Critics of the prior administration also see the release of the documents as necessary to determine whether former administration officials should be held accountable for legal opinions that justified various antiterrorism measures, including the use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
Attorney General nominee Eric Holder recently denounced waterboarding as torture, but details about how the method was used have remained secret.
"We don't have anything resembling a full picture of what happened over the last eight years and on what grounds the Bush administration believed it could order such methods," Jaffer said. "We think the OLC memos are really central to that narrative."
Even though some key memos have been released or leaked to the media, at least 50 memos remain secret, Jaffer said, including a dozen memos related to the warrantless wiretapping program.
In one case, the ACLU found out about a memo because it was cited in a footnote. The government has refused to elaborate on the 2002 document, other than to describe it as a discussion of the Fourth Amendment's application to domestic military operations.
Jaffer said that it could reveal whether the Justice Department was advising the National Security Agency that the Fourth Amendment didn't apply to its eavesdropping program, but he's not certain. The amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
"There are about a dozen memos where we just have one or two lines about the subject matter and that's it," he said. "When you put it all together you realize how much is still being held secret."
The ACLU originally sought the documents by filing a series of lawsuits under FOIA.
Federal judges have ordered the release of some records, including thousands of pages documenting the FBI's concerns about the interrogation program.
The Bush administration, however, fought the release of most of the records.
In September 2007, U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy rejected the government's claim of secrecy and ordered the Justice Department to submit surveillance documents for his review.
The ACLU has asked another judge to find CIA officials in contempt after revelations that videotapes of CIA interrogations had been destroyed. A criminal investigation is ongoing.
Since Obama's directive on disclosure, Melanie Ann Pustay, the director of Justice's Office of Information and Privacy, instructed federal officials that they should process requests for records with a "clear presumption in favor of disclosure, to resolve doubts in favor of openness, and to not withhold information based on 'speculative or abstract fears.'"
In another indication that the ACLU may get its way, the nominee to head the OLC, Dawn Johnsen, has previously indicated she thinks that such memos should generally be released.
Before her nomination, Johnsen wrote in an article for Slate, the internet magazine, that the central question in the debate was whether OLC could issue "binding legal opinions that in essence tell the president and the executive branch that they need not comply with existing laws — and then not share those opinions and that legal reasoning with Congress or the American people? I would submit that clearly the answer to that question must be no."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-1
'Wake Up, World!' - SOS From the Amazon
Published on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 by Inter Press Service
by Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil - A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message "SOS Amazon" to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).
"We are raising our voices as a wake-up call to the world, especially the rich countries that are hastening its destruction," said Edmundo Omoré, a member of the Xavante indigenous community from the west-central state of Mato Grosso on the border between the Amazon region and the Cerrado, a vast savannah region in the centre of the country.
Both men belong to the Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which joined the Quito-based Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) to create their "message from the heart of the Amazon."
Nearly 1,300 indigenous people from about 50 countries, although mainly from Brazil, plan to raise the issues of their rights as original peoples and environmental preservation at this year's edition of the WSF, which runs through Sunday in Belém, a city of 1.4 million people and the northeastern gateway to the Amazon.
Indigenous people have participated in the WSF in previous years, but this time a much larger presence was sought. The aim was for 2,000 to take part, but transport costs and financial difficulties prevented many participants from coming from other countries and from remote areas within Brazil itself.
In addition to indigenous groups, original peoples at the WSF include Quilombolas (members of communities of Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped slaves) and other native peoples.
The key location chosen for the WSF, and the various global crises that are occurring, have created "a special moment" for original peoples to take a leading role, according to Roberto Espinoza, an adviser to the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organisations (CAOI).
"A crisis of civilisation" is under way, said Espinoza, who described the serious economic, energy and food problems, as well as climate change, as part of the same phenomenon.
In this situation, indigenous people should have political participation as of right, not "as folklore or as a merely cultural contribution," Espinoza, one of the coordinators of the indigenous peoples' presence at the WSF, told IPS.
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, is of paramount importance here, he said. It should not be seen as a "utopian" document; rather, its provisions should be binding, like those of the International Labour Organisation's Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.
Espinoza said he hoped this WSF would produce an agreement for global demonstrations similar to those held in 2003 against the United States' invasion of Iraq.
This time around, the goal would be to mobilise "in defence of Mother Earth and against the commercialisation of life," added to specific causes championed by each nation, such as the fight against hydroelectric power stations in Brazil that flood vast areas of Amazon rainforest and displace riverbank dwellers, he said.
The voices of indigenous people are bound to have a greater impact on environmental matters when "the risk of catastrophic climate change in the near future and disputes over natural resources are threatening the survival not only of indigenous peoples, but of humanity itself," Espinoza said.
Indigenous and environmental issues will be even more visible on Wednesday, which is to be dedicated entirely to the Amazon region in an attempt to revitalise the PanAmazon Social Forum, inactive since 2005.
Launching a campaign led by the peoples of the Amazon, who "want a society that values them and understands the value that the land has for them," is a proposal for discussion at the WSF, according to Miquelina Machado, a COIAB leader belonging to the Tukano ethnic group.
This is necessary for "a greater balance with nature," at a time when Brazil's plans for economic growth and the physical integration of South America are fuelling projects which have "strong negative impacts on the Amazon and Andean regions," she told IPS.
"The hydroelectric dams flood the land and destroy biodiversity," she said, while lamenting the fact that attempts to block the building of highways, that cause immense deforestation, have been frustrated in the courts, "which have more power."
The presence at the WSF of presidents of Amazon region countries like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, should increase the impact of the event, hopefully benefiting the peoples of the Amazon, Machado concluded.
Indigenous peoples' voices should be heard, because "we are the ones who were born and raised in the middle of the forest, and who lead a lifestyle that contrasts with the ambition of capitalism, which does not bring benefits to all," said Omoré.
Furthermore, "we are the first to suffer the effects" of climate change. Rich people can cool themselves down with air conditioners and buy food in supermarkets, but "we depend on the fish in the river and the animals in the forest, so we are concerned about the future that belongs to everyone," added Batista.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-8
by Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil - A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message "SOS Amazon" to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).
"We are raising our voices as a wake-up call to the world, especially the rich countries that are hastening its destruction," said Edmundo Omoré, a member of the Xavante indigenous community from the west-central state of Mato Grosso on the border between the Amazon region and the Cerrado, a vast savannah region in the centre of the country.
Both men belong to the Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which joined the Quito-based Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) to create their "message from the heart of the Amazon."
Nearly 1,300 indigenous people from about 50 countries, although mainly from Brazil, plan to raise the issues of their rights as original peoples and environmental preservation at this year's edition of the WSF, which runs through Sunday in Belém, a city of 1.4 million people and the northeastern gateway to the Amazon.
Indigenous people have participated in the WSF in previous years, but this time a much larger presence was sought. The aim was for 2,000 to take part, but transport costs and financial difficulties prevented many participants from coming from other countries and from remote areas within Brazil itself.
In addition to indigenous groups, original peoples at the WSF include Quilombolas (members of communities of Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped slaves) and other native peoples.
The key location chosen for the WSF, and the various global crises that are occurring, have created "a special moment" for original peoples to take a leading role, according to Roberto Espinoza, an adviser to the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organisations (CAOI).
"A crisis of civilisation" is under way, said Espinoza, who described the serious economic, energy and food problems, as well as climate change, as part of the same phenomenon.
In this situation, indigenous people should have political participation as of right, not "as folklore or as a merely cultural contribution," Espinoza, one of the coordinators of the indigenous peoples' presence at the WSF, told IPS.
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, is of paramount importance here, he said. It should not be seen as a "utopian" document; rather, its provisions should be binding, like those of the International Labour Organisation's Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.
Espinoza said he hoped this WSF would produce an agreement for global demonstrations similar to those held in 2003 against the United States' invasion of Iraq.
This time around, the goal would be to mobilise "in defence of Mother Earth and against the commercialisation of life," added to specific causes championed by each nation, such as the fight against hydroelectric power stations in Brazil that flood vast areas of Amazon rainforest and displace riverbank dwellers, he said.
The voices of indigenous people are bound to have a greater impact on environmental matters when "the risk of catastrophic climate change in the near future and disputes over natural resources are threatening the survival not only of indigenous peoples, but of humanity itself," Espinoza said.
Indigenous and environmental issues will be even more visible on Wednesday, which is to be dedicated entirely to the Amazon region in an attempt to revitalise the PanAmazon Social Forum, inactive since 2005.
Launching a campaign led by the peoples of the Amazon, who "want a society that values them and understands the value that the land has for them," is a proposal for discussion at the WSF, according to Miquelina Machado, a COIAB leader belonging to the Tukano ethnic group.
This is necessary for "a greater balance with nature," at a time when Brazil's plans for economic growth and the physical integration of South America are fuelling projects which have "strong negative impacts on the Amazon and Andean regions," she told IPS.
"The hydroelectric dams flood the land and destroy biodiversity," she said, while lamenting the fact that attempts to block the building of highways, that cause immense deforestation, have been frustrated in the courts, "which have more power."
The presence at the WSF of presidents of Amazon region countries like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, should increase the impact of the event, hopefully benefiting the peoples of the Amazon, Machado concluded.
Indigenous peoples' voices should be heard, because "we are the ones who were born and raised in the middle of the forest, and who lead a lifestyle that contrasts with the ambition of capitalism, which does not bring benefits to all," said Omoré.
Furthermore, "we are the first to suffer the effects" of climate change. Rich people can cool themselves down with air conditioners and buy food in supermarkets, but "we depend on the fish in the river and the animals in the forest, so we are concerned about the future that belongs to everyone," added Batista.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-8
Pentagon Nominee May Make $500,000 on Raytheon Stock
by the Associated Press
Ex-lobbyist exempt from Obama order
WASHINGTON - The man nominated to be the Pentagon's second-in-command could make at least a half-million dollars next month with vested stock he earned as a lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon.
William J. Lynn, who was chosen to be deputy defense secretary despite an Obama administration order against "revolving door" lobbyists who become public officials, has pledged to sell his stock in the Waltham-based company before taking the job.
[This is an undated photo provided by the U.S. Department of Defense of William J. Lynn then Under Secretary of Defense. President-elect Barack Obama appointed William J. Lynn III, a defense contractor's lobbyist, Thursday Jan. 8, 2009 to become the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, a choice that appeared to break with his self-imposed rules to keep lobbyists at arm's length. Lynn, former Raytheon lobbyist nominated to be deputy defense secretary despite President Barack Obama's ban on hiring lobbyists, will sell his stock in the military contracting firm. (AP Photo/DOD, File)]This is an undated photo provided by the U.S. Department of Defense of William J. Lynn then Under Secretary of Defense. President-elect Barack Obama appointed William J. Lynn III, a defense contractor's lobbyist, Thursday Jan. 8, 2009 to become the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, a choice that appeared to break with his self-imposed rules to keep lobbyists at arm's length. Lynn, former Raytheon lobbyist nominated to be deputy defense secretary despite President Barack Obama's ban on hiring lobbyists, will sell his stock in the military contracting firm. (AP Photo/DOD, File)
Financial disclosure documents obtained yesterday by the Associated Press show Lynn owns Raytheon "incentive" stock valued between $500,001 and $1 million that is set to vest in February, plus "unvested restricted stock" valued between $250,001 and $500,000.
The documents also show Raytheon also gave Lynn a 2008 cash bonus of between $100,001 and $250,000 to be paid in March of this year. Lynn received a salary of $369,615 last year as a senior vice president at Raytheon, where he began working in August 2002.
As a Raytheon lobbyist until last year, Lynn worked on matters with far reach across the Pentagon, including contracting policy, the military's use of space, missile defense, munitions and artillery, sensors and radars, and advanced technology programs. Raytheon is one of the military's top contractors, with $18.3 billion in US government business in 2007.
Initially, Senate Democrats and Republicans alike balked at Lynn's nomination, citing concerns about a potential conflict of interest in running the massive department he lobbied for six years. Shortly after taking office last week, President Obama issued ethics requirements prohibiting individuals from working for government agencies they have lobbied in the past two years.
But last week, the Obama administration gave the Senate Armed Services Committee a waiver exempting Lynn from two specific sections: a two-year prohibition on employees from participating in decisions related to their former employers and a more specific section banning individuals from taking jobs in the agencies they recently lobbied.
Instead, Lynn's dealings at the Defense Department will be subject to ethics reviews for one year. Lynn's nomination is expected to move forward.
Testifying before the Senate panel yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said stringent ethics rules are a major reason it is difficult to fill top posts at the Pentagon and said it was time to ensure we are not "cutting off our nose to spite our face."
Gates sought Lynn as his deputy and did not want him to have to recuse himself outright from all decisions involving Raytheon because it would severely limit his ability to do his job.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-3
Ex-lobbyist exempt from Obama order
WASHINGTON - The man nominated to be the Pentagon's second-in-command could make at least a half-million dollars next month with vested stock he earned as a lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon.
William J. Lynn, who was chosen to be deputy defense secretary despite an Obama administration order against "revolving door" lobbyists who become public officials, has pledged to sell his stock in the Waltham-based company before taking the job.
[This is an undated photo provided by the U.S. Department of Defense of William J. Lynn then Under Secretary of Defense. President-elect Barack Obama appointed William J. Lynn III, a defense contractor's lobbyist, Thursday Jan. 8, 2009 to become the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, a choice that appeared to break with his self-imposed rules to keep lobbyists at arm's length. Lynn, former Raytheon lobbyist nominated to be deputy defense secretary despite President Barack Obama's ban on hiring lobbyists, will sell his stock in the military contracting firm. (AP Photo/DOD, File)]This is an undated photo provided by the U.S. Department of Defense of William J. Lynn then Under Secretary of Defense. President-elect Barack Obama appointed William J. Lynn III, a defense contractor's lobbyist, Thursday Jan. 8, 2009 to become the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, a choice that appeared to break with his self-imposed rules to keep lobbyists at arm's length. Lynn, former Raytheon lobbyist nominated to be deputy defense secretary despite President Barack Obama's ban on hiring lobbyists, will sell his stock in the military contracting firm. (AP Photo/DOD, File)
Financial disclosure documents obtained yesterday by the Associated Press show Lynn owns Raytheon "incentive" stock valued between $500,001 and $1 million that is set to vest in February, plus "unvested restricted stock" valued between $250,001 and $500,000.
The documents also show Raytheon also gave Lynn a 2008 cash bonus of between $100,001 and $250,000 to be paid in March of this year. Lynn received a salary of $369,615 last year as a senior vice president at Raytheon, where he began working in August 2002.
As a Raytheon lobbyist until last year, Lynn worked on matters with far reach across the Pentagon, including contracting policy, the military's use of space, missile defense, munitions and artillery, sensors and radars, and advanced technology programs. Raytheon is one of the military's top contractors, with $18.3 billion in US government business in 2007.
Initially, Senate Democrats and Republicans alike balked at Lynn's nomination, citing concerns about a potential conflict of interest in running the massive department he lobbied for six years. Shortly after taking office last week, President Obama issued ethics requirements prohibiting individuals from working for government agencies they have lobbied in the past two years.
But last week, the Obama administration gave the Senate Armed Services Committee a waiver exempting Lynn from two specific sections: a two-year prohibition on employees from participating in decisions related to their former employers and a more specific section banning individuals from taking jobs in the agencies they recently lobbied.
Instead, Lynn's dealings at the Defense Department will be subject to ethics reviews for one year. Lynn's nomination is expected to move forward.
Testifying before the Senate panel yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said stringent ethics rules are a major reason it is difficult to fill top posts at the Pentagon and said it was time to ensure we are not "cutting off our nose to spite our face."
Gates sought Lynn as his deputy and did not want him to have to recuse himself outright from all decisions involving Raytheon because it would severely limit his ability to do his job.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-3
Unemployment rose in every state in December
Manufacturing particularly hit, analyst sees trend continuing through year
The Associated Press
updated 10:10 a.m. CT, Wed., Jan. 28, 2009
WASHINGTON - Rising unemployment spared no state last month, and 2009 is shaping up as another miserable year for workers from coast to coast.
Jobless rates for December hit double digits in Michigan and Rhode Island, while South Carolina and Indiana notched the biggest gains from the previous month, the Labor Department said Tuesday. A common thread among these states has been manufacturing industry layoffs tied to consumers' shrinking appetite for cars, furniture and other goods.
With tens of thousands of layoffs announced this week by well-known employers such as Pfizer Inc., Caterpillar Inc. and Home Depot Inc., the unemployment picture is bound to get worse in every region of the country, economists say.
The government said Wednesday the number of layoffs involving 50 or more workers across the country jumped by one-third in 2008 from the previous year, and the pace of job cuts appears to have quickened since then.
"We won't see a light at the end of the tunnel until 2010," said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John's University.
The number of newly laid off Americans filing claims for state unemployment benefits has soared to 589,000, while people continuing to draw claims climbed to 4.6 million, the government said last week. There's been such a crush that resources in New York, California and other states have run dry, forcing them to tap the federal government for money to keep paying unemployment benefits.
Aside from manufacturing, jobs in construction, financial services and retailing are vanishing — casualties of the housing, credit and financial crises.
The Labor Department said Wednesday 21,137 mass layoffs took place last year, up from 15,493 in 2007. That's the highest annual total since 2001, the last time the economy was in recession, and the second-highest since the department began tracking mass layoffs in 1995.
The department says more than 2.1 million workers were fired as a result of last year's mass layoffs.
Clobbered by problems at Detroit's auto companies, Michigan's unemployment rate soared to 10.6 percent in December. Rhode Island's jobless rate hit 10 percent, the highest on records dating back to 1976.
Those states — along with eight others and the District of Columbia — registered unemployment rates higher than the nationwide average of 7.2 percent, a 16-year high.
South Carolina and Indiana posted the biggest bumps in their monthly unemployment rates. Each state logged a 1.1 percentage point rise in unemployment from November to December.
In South Carolina, the unemployment rate bolted to 9.5 percent as laid-off textile, clothing and other factory workers found it difficult to find new jobs.
"The money I was making, I'd be hard-pressed to find a job paying that," said Gregory Smalls, a 49-year-old Columbia, S.C., resident who lost his more than $50,000-a-year job as a truck body shop manager when his department merged with a dealership's service department.
Indiana's jobless rate soared to 8.2 percent in December as workers were hit by layoffs in manufacturing — including at engine maker Cummins Inc. — as well as in construction and retail.
Many Indiana counties with high jobless rates are in the northern part of the state, which has been battered by layoffs in the recreational vehicle industry. Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs at RV makers such as Monaco Coach Corp., Keystone RV Co. and Pilgrim International.
Gayle Glaser, who owns the Shortstop Inn restaurant in Wakarusa, Ind., said those job losses have hurt her business, too.
"We just don't have the traffic here from the plants," she said. "All my customers coming in — they're all laid off."
States that have been spared the worst of the recession's pain tend to benefit from energy and agriculture production, while also having relatively minimal exposure to the housing and manufacturing busts.
Wyoming posted the lowest unemployment rate, 3.4 percent in December. It was followed closely by North Dakota at 3.5 percent and South Dakota at 3.9 percent.
In 2008, the country lost 2.6 million jobs, and in 2009 at least 2 million more jobs are forecast to disappear.
Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corp. said Tuesday that it will cut an undisclosed number of workers at its headquarters. Elsewhere, specialty glass company Corning Inc. said it would cut 3,500 jobs, or 13 percent of its work force, as demand slumped for glass used in flat-screen televisions and computers. And chemical company Ashland Inc. said it would eliminate 1,300 jobs, freeze wages and adopt a two-week furlough program.
Roughly 40,000 layoffs were announced on Monday by a string of companies, including Pfizer, Caterpillar and Home Depot.
To stimulate job growth and the broader economy, President Barack Obama and Congress are racing to enact a $825 billion package of tax cuts and increased federal spending, including money for big public works projects.
The U.S. has been mired in a recession since December 2007. It is on track to be the longest downturn since World War II.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28882024/
The Associated Press
updated 10:10 a.m. CT, Wed., Jan. 28, 2009
WASHINGTON - Rising unemployment spared no state last month, and 2009 is shaping up as another miserable year for workers from coast to coast.
Jobless rates for December hit double digits in Michigan and Rhode Island, while South Carolina and Indiana notched the biggest gains from the previous month, the Labor Department said Tuesday. A common thread among these states has been manufacturing industry layoffs tied to consumers' shrinking appetite for cars, furniture and other goods.
With tens of thousands of layoffs announced this week by well-known employers such as Pfizer Inc., Caterpillar Inc. and Home Depot Inc., the unemployment picture is bound to get worse in every region of the country, economists say.
The government said Wednesday the number of layoffs involving 50 or more workers across the country jumped by one-third in 2008 from the previous year, and the pace of job cuts appears to have quickened since then.
"We won't see a light at the end of the tunnel until 2010," said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John's University.
The number of newly laid off Americans filing claims for state unemployment benefits has soared to 589,000, while people continuing to draw claims climbed to 4.6 million, the government said last week. There's been such a crush that resources in New York, California and other states have run dry, forcing them to tap the federal government for money to keep paying unemployment benefits.
Aside from manufacturing, jobs in construction, financial services and retailing are vanishing — casualties of the housing, credit and financial crises.
The Labor Department said Wednesday 21,137 mass layoffs took place last year, up from 15,493 in 2007. That's the highest annual total since 2001, the last time the economy was in recession, and the second-highest since the department began tracking mass layoffs in 1995.
The department says more than 2.1 million workers were fired as a result of last year's mass layoffs.
Clobbered by problems at Detroit's auto companies, Michigan's unemployment rate soared to 10.6 percent in December. Rhode Island's jobless rate hit 10 percent, the highest on records dating back to 1976.
Those states — along with eight others and the District of Columbia — registered unemployment rates higher than the nationwide average of 7.2 percent, a 16-year high.
South Carolina and Indiana posted the biggest bumps in their monthly unemployment rates. Each state logged a 1.1 percentage point rise in unemployment from November to December.
In South Carolina, the unemployment rate bolted to 9.5 percent as laid-off textile, clothing and other factory workers found it difficult to find new jobs.
"The money I was making, I'd be hard-pressed to find a job paying that," said Gregory Smalls, a 49-year-old Columbia, S.C., resident who lost his more than $50,000-a-year job as a truck body shop manager when his department merged with a dealership's service department.
Indiana's jobless rate soared to 8.2 percent in December as workers were hit by layoffs in manufacturing — including at engine maker Cummins Inc. — as well as in construction and retail.
Many Indiana counties with high jobless rates are in the northern part of the state, which has been battered by layoffs in the recreational vehicle industry. Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs at RV makers such as Monaco Coach Corp., Keystone RV Co. and Pilgrim International.
Gayle Glaser, who owns the Shortstop Inn restaurant in Wakarusa, Ind., said those job losses have hurt her business, too.
"We just don't have the traffic here from the plants," she said. "All my customers coming in — they're all laid off."
States that have been spared the worst of the recession's pain tend to benefit from energy and agriculture production, while also having relatively minimal exposure to the housing and manufacturing busts.
Wyoming posted the lowest unemployment rate, 3.4 percent in December. It was followed closely by North Dakota at 3.5 percent and South Dakota at 3.9 percent.
In 2008, the country lost 2.6 million jobs, and in 2009 at least 2 million more jobs are forecast to disappear.
Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corp. said Tuesday that it will cut an undisclosed number of workers at its headquarters. Elsewhere, specialty glass company Corning Inc. said it would cut 3,500 jobs, or 13 percent of its work force, as demand slumped for glass used in flat-screen televisions and computers. And chemical company Ashland Inc. said it would eliminate 1,300 jobs, freeze wages and adopt a two-week furlough program.
Roughly 40,000 layoffs were announced on Monday by a string of companies, including Pfizer, Caterpillar and Home Depot.
To stimulate job growth and the broader economy, President Barack Obama and Congress are racing to enact a $825 billion package of tax cuts and increased federal spending, including money for big public works projects.
The U.S. has been mired in a recession since December 2007. It is on track to be the longest downturn since World War II.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28882024/
UN official: Enough evidence to prosecute Rumsfeld for war crimes
01/26/2009 @ 8:51 pm
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Monday, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN's Rick Sanchez that the US has an "obligation" to investigate whether Bush administration officials ordered torture, adding that he believes that there is already enough evidence to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."
Asked during an interview with Germany's ZDF television on Jan. 20, Nowak said: "I think the evidence is on the table."
At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognize these forms of torture."
A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.
It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
The coercive measures were based on a document signed by Bush in February, 2002.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/UN_official_Enough_evidence_to_prosecute_0126.html
Filed by David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Monday, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN's Rick Sanchez that the US has an "obligation" to investigate whether Bush administration officials ordered torture, adding that he believes that there is already enough evidence to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."
Asked during an interview with Germany's ZDF television on Jan. 20, Nowak said: "I think the evidence is on the table."
At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognize these forms of torture."
A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.
It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
The coercive measures were based on a document signed by Bush in February, 2002.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/UN_official_Enough_evidence_to_prosecute_0126.html
Birth control funding stripped from stimulus
01/28/2009 @ 9:59 am
Filed by John Byrne
Obama concedes contraception measure
In an apparent effort to appease House Republicans, President Barack Obama has stripped funding for birth control from the $825 billion stimulus package.
According to the White House, while Obama “believed that the policy of increased funding for family planning was the right one ... he didn’t believe that this bill was the vehicle to make that happen,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
The decision to cut birth control funding from the stimulus package comes on the heels of a victory for pro-choice advocates, who won a reprieve from the so-called "global gag rule," which prohibited countries and organizations receiving US aid from offering programs discussing abortion options for women. But the gag rule had been previously stripped by Democratic presidents and reinstated by Republican presidents, so the decision to scrap the gag rule didn't come as a surprise.
Obama called House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) to formally nix the birth control funds, according to Politico. The bill is slated to go to a vote today.
House Republicans had bemoaned the provision.
“How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives?” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) remarked last week. “How does that stimulate the economy?”
The birth control measure was part of a $300 million package intended to slow the spread of STDs. The United States has the highest STD rate among industrialized nations in the world.
The proposal sought to cut costs for states by making it easier for them to pay for contraception for women under Medicaid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was criticized by Republicans after recently claiming that "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government".
Boehner then complained to Fox News, "Regardless of where anyone stands on taxpayer funding for contraceptives and the abortion industry, there is no doubt that this once little-known provision in the congressional Democrats' spending plan has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and creating more American jobs."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Birth_control_funding_stripped_from_stimulus_0128.html
Filed by John Byrne
Obama concedes contraception measure
In an apparent effort to appease House Republicans, President Barack Obama has stripped funding for birth control from the $825 billion stimulus package.
According to the White House, while Obama “believed that the policy of increased funding for family planning was the right one ... he didn’t believe that this bill was the vehicle to make that happen,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
The decision to cut birth control funding from the stimulus package comes on the heels of a victory for pro-choice advocates, who won a reprieve from the so-called "global gag rule," which prohibited countries and organizations receiving US aid from offering programs discussing abortion options for women. But the gag rule had been previously stripped by Democratic presidents and reinstated by Republican presidents, so the decision to scrap the gag rule didn't come as a surprise.
Obama called House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) to formally nix the birth control funds, according to Politico. The bill is slated to go to a vote today.
House Republicans had bemoaned the provision.
“How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives?” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) remarked last week. “How does that stimulate the economy?”
The birth control measure was part of a $300 million package intended to slow the spread of STDs. The United States has the highest STD rate among industrialized nations in the world.
The proposal sought to cut costs for states by making it easier for them to pay for contraception for women under Medicaid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was criticized by Republicans after recently claiming that "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government".
Boehner then complained to Fox News, "Regardless of where anyone stands on taxpayer funding for contraceptives and the abortion industry, there is no doubt that this once little-known provision in the congressional Democrats' spending plan has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and creating more American jobs."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Birth_control_funding_stripped_from_stimulus_0128.html
Three men indicted for burning black church on election night
Jeremy Gantz
Published: Tuesday January 27, 2009
Just hours after Barack Obama was elected president last November, three men set ablaze a predominantly African-American church in Massachusetts to "interfere" with the civil rights of its congregants, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday.
Benjamin Haskell, 22, Michael Jacques, 24, and Thomas Gleason, 21, all of Springfield, Mass., burned Macedonia Church of God in Christ to the ground in the early hours of Nov. 5th as payback for the election of the country’s first African-American president, the department's indictment alleges.
The three men were released Monday on $100,000 bail each, the Springfield Republican reported, after spending 11 days in federal custody.
"These allegations of racial violence connected with the presidential election are serious and disturbing," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King. "The Justice Department will aggressively prosecute individuals who conspire to commit such acts of violence and intimidation."
Before they burned the Pentecostal church, the construction of which was 75 percent complete, the men used racial slurs to express anger with Obama's victory and discussed burning the new church building because the church members, congregants and bishop were African-American, according to the indictment.
After finding gasoline, the trio poured it on the interior and exterior of the 18,000 square-foot building and set it ablaze, the department said, which ended up injuring firefighters.
Haskell, Jacques and Gleason face a maximum prison sentence of 10 years If convicted. The department did not say when a trial would begin.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Three_men_indicted_for_burning_black_0127.html
Published: Tuesday January 27, 2009
Just hours after Barack Obama was elected president last November, three men set ablaze a predominantly African-American church in Massachusetts to "interfere" with the civil rights of its congregants, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday.
Benjamin Haskell, 22, Michael Jacques, 24, and Thomas Gleason, 21, all of Springfield, Mass., burned Macedonia Church of God in Christ to the ground in the early hours of Nov. 5th as payback for the election of the country’s first African-American president, the department's indictment alleges.
The three men were released Monday on $100,000 bail each, the Springfield Republican reported, after spending 11 days in federal custody.
"These allegations of racial violence connected with the presidential election are serious and disturbing," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King. "The Justice Department will aggressively prosecute individuals who conspire to commit such acts of violence and intimidation."
Before they burned the Pentecostal church, the construction of which was 75 percent complete, the men used racial slurs to express anger with Obama's victory and discussed burning the new church building because the church members, congregants and bishop were African-American, according to the indictment.
After finding gasoline, the trio poured it on the interior and exterior of the 18,000 square-foot building and set it ablaze, the department said, which ended up injuring firefighters.
Haskell, Jacques and Gleason face a maximum prison sentence of 10 years If convicted. The department did not say when a trial would begin.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Three_men_indicted_for_burning_black_0127.html
Behind the Executive Orders
January 25, 2009
On Thursday, President Barack Obama consigned to history the worst excesses of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.” One of the four executive orders that Obama signed effectively cancelled seven years of controversial Justice Department legal opinions authorizing methods of treating terror suspects so brutal that even a top Bush Administration official overseeing prosecutions at Guantánamo, Susan Crawford, recently admitted that they amounted to torture. According to some of those opinions, many of which remain classified, President Bush could authorize U.S. officials to capture, interrogate, and indefinitely imprison terror suspects all around the globe, outside of any legal process.
The Obama Administration’s reforms may have seemed as simple as the stroke of a pen. But, on Friday afternoon, the new White House counsel, Greg Craig, acknowledged that the reversal had been gestating for more than a year. Moreover, Craig noted in his first White House interview that the reforms were not finished yet and that Obama had deliberately postponed several of the hardest legal questions. Craig said that, as he talked with the President before the signing ceremony, Obama was “very clear in his own mind about what he wanted to accomplish, and what he wanted to leave open for further consultation with experts.”
The steps already taken amount to a stunning political turnaround. One of the executive orders places all terror suspects held abroad unambiguously under the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which outlaw any cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Obama also unilaterally closed the C.I.A.’s “black sites,” and set a one-year deadline for closing the military prison camp at Guantánamo. He decreed that, from now on, the International Committee for the Red Cross must have access to all detainees in U.S. custody; the Bush Administration barred the Red Cross from seeing prisoners held by the C.I.A.
Sitting at a spotless conference table in an undecorated West Wing corner office up a narrow flight of stairs from the Oval Office, Craig, who is sixty-three, seemed boyish and energized. He explained that Obama’s bold legal moves were the result of a “painstaking” process that started in Iowa, before the first Presidential caucus. It was there that Obama met with a handful of former high-ranking military officers who opposed the Bush Administration’s legalization of abusive interrogations. Sickened by the photographs from Abu Ghraib and disheartened by what they regarded as the illegal and dangerous degradation of military standards, the officers had formed an unlikely alliance with the legal-advocacy group Human Rights First, and had begun lobbying the candidates of both parties to close the loopholes that Bush had opened for torture.
Obama was “very excited” that day in Iowa, one participant in the off-the-record meeting recalled, “because he had just gotten polls showing that he was ahead,” but he didn’t seem particularly “comfortable” with the military delegation. The group of military men, which included the retired four-star generals Dave Maddox and Joseph Hoar, lectured Obama about the importance of being Commander-in-Chief. In particular, they warned him that every word he uttered would be taken as an order by the highest-ranking officers as well as the lowliest private. Any wiggle room for abusive interrogations, they emphasized, would be construed as permission.
Obama “asked smart questions, but didn’t seem inspired by it. He totally understood the effect that Abu Ghraib had on America’s reputation,” the participant said. But, in general, “he was very businesslike. He didn’t flatter the officers,” as most of the other candidates had. In addition, Obama’s staff, the participant said, approached the meeting with the retired officers with less urgency than some of the other campaigns had. “But,” the participant said, in retrospect, “it started an education process.”
Last month, several members of the same group met with both Craig, who by then was slated to become Obama’s top legal adviser, and Attorney General-designate Eric Holder. The two future Obama Administration lawyers were particularly taken with a retired four-star Marine general and conservative Republican named Charles (Chuck) Krulak. Krulak insisted that ending the Bush Administration’s coercive interrogation and detention regime was “right for America and right for the world,” a participant recalled, and promised that if the Obama Administration did what he described as “the right thing,” which he acknowledged wouldn’t be politically easy, he would personally “fly cover” for them.
Last week, as Obama signed the executive order, sixteen retired generals and flag officers from the same group did just that. Told on Monday that they were needed at the White House, they flew to the capital from as far away as California, a phalanx of square-jawed certified patriots providing cover for Obama’s announcement.
Shortly before the signing ceremony, Craig said, Obama met with the officers in the Roosevelt Room, along with Vice-President Biden and several other top Administration officials. “It was hugely important to the President to have the input from these military people,” Craig said, “not only because of their proven concern for protecting the American people—they’d dedicated their lives to it—but also because some had their own experience they could speak from.” Two of the officers had sons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them, retired Major General Paul Eaton, stressed that, as he put it later that day, “torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It’s also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have.” The feeling in the room, as retired Rear Admiral John Hutson later put it, “was joy, perhaps, that the country was getting back on track.”
Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. “They disagree in some respect,” Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.”
Despite such sentiments, Obama’s executive orders will undoubtedly rein in the C.I.A. Waterboarding, for instance, has gone the way of the rack, now that the C.I.A. is strictly bound by customary interpretations of the Geneva Conventions. This decision, too, was the result of intense deliberation. During the transition period, unknown to the public, Obama’s legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers visited Langley for two long sessions with current and former intelligence-community members. They debated whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to prepare a cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions may surprise defenders of harsh interrogation tactics. “There was unanimity among Obama’s expert advisers,” Craig said, “that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/01/behind-the-executive-orders.html?printable=true
On Thursday, President Barack Obama consigned to history the worst excesses of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.” One of the four executive orders that Obama signed effectively cancelled seven years of controversial Justice Department legal opinions authorizing methods of treating terror suspects so brutal that even a top Bush Administration official overseeing prosecutions at Guantánamo, Susan Crawford, recently admitted that they amounted to torture. According to some of those opinions, many of which remain classified, President Bush could authorize U.S. officials to capture, interrogate, and indefinitely imprison terror suspects all around the globe, outside of any legal process.
The Obama Administration’s reforms may have seemed as simple as the stroke of a pen. But, on Friday afternoon, the new White House counsel, Greg Craig, acknowledged that the reversal had been gestating for more than a year. Moreover, Craig noted in his first White House interview that the reforms were not finished yet and that Obama had deliberately postponed several of the hardest legal questions. Craig said that, as he talked with the President before the signing ceremony, Obama was “very clear in his own mind about what he wanted to accomplish, and what he wanted to leave open for further consultation with experts.”
The steps already taken amount to a stunning political turnaround. One of the executive orders places all terror suspects held abroad unambiguously under the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which outlaw any cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Obama also unilaterally closed the C.I.A.’s “black sites,” and set a one-year deadline for closing the military prison camp at Guantánamo. He decreed that, from now on, the International Committee for the Red Cross must have access to all detainees in U.S. custody; the Bush Administration barred the Red Cross from seeing prisoners held by the C.I.A.
Sitting at a spotless conference table in an undecorated West Wing corner office up a narrow flight of stairs from the Oval Office, Craig, who is sixty-three, seemed boyish and energized. He explained that Obama’s bold legal moves were the result of a “painstaking” process that started in Iowa, before the first Presidential caucus. It was there that Obama met with a handful of former high-ranking military officers who opposed the Bush Administration’s legalization of abusive interrogations. Sickened by the photographs from Abu Ghraib and disheartened by what they regarded as the illegal and dangerous degradation of military standards, the officers had formed an unlikely alliance with the legal-advocacy group Human Rights First, and had begun lobbying the candidates of both parties to close the loopholes that Bush had opened for torture.
Obama was “very excited” that day in Iowa, one participant in the off-the-record meeting recalled, “because he had just gotten polls showing that he was ahead,” but he didn’t seem particularly “comfortable” with the military delegation. The group of military men, which included the retired four-star generals Dave Maddox and Joseph Hoar, lectured Obama about the importance of being Commander-in-Chief. In particular, they warned him that every word he uttered would be taken as an order by the highest-ranking officers as well as the lowliest private. Any wiggle room for abusive interrogations, they emphasized, would be construed as permission.
Obama “asked smart questions, but didn’t seem inspired by it. He totally understood the effect that Abu Ghraib had on America’s reputation,” the participant said. But, in general, “he was very businesslike. He didn’t flatter the officers,” as most of the other candidates had. In addition, Obama’s staff, the participant said, approached the meeting with the retired officers with less urgency than some of the other campaigns had. “But,” the participant said, in retrospect, “it started an education process.”
Last month, several members of the same group met with both Craig, who by then was slated to become Obama’s top legal adviser, and Attorney General-designate Eric Holder. The two future Obama Administration lawyers were particularly taken with a retired four-star Marine general and conservative Republican named Charles (Chuck) Krulak. Krulak insisted that ending the Bush Administration’s coercive interrogation and detention regime was “right for America and right for the world,” a participant recalled, and promised that if the Obama Administration did what he described as “the right thing,” which he acknowledged wouldn’t be politically easy, he would personally “fly cover” for them.
Last week, as Obama signed the executive order, sixteen retired generals and flag officers from the same group did just that. Told on Monday that they were needed at the White House, they flew to the capital from as far away as California, a phalanx of square-jawed certified patriots providing cover for Obama’s announcement.
Shortly before the signing ceremony, Craig said, Obama met with the officers in the Roosevelt Room, along with Vice-President Biden and several other top Administration officials. “It was hugely important to the President to have the input from these military people,” Craig said, “not only because of their proven concern for protecting the American people—they’d dedicated their lives to it—but also because some had their own experience they could speak from.” Two of the officers had sons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them, retired Major General Paul Eaton, stressed that, as he put it later that day, “torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It’s also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have.” The feeling in the room, as retired Rear Admiral John Hutson later put it, “was joy, perhaps, that the country was getting back on track.”
Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. “They disagree in some respect,” Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.”
Despite such sentiments, Obama’s executive orders will undoubtedly rein in the C.I.A. Waterboarding, for instance, has gone the way of the rack, now that the C.I.A. is strictly bound by customary interpretations of the Geneva Conventions. This decision, too, was the result of intense deliberation. During the transition period, unknown to the public, Obama’s legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers visited Langley for two long sessions with current and former intelligence-community members. They debated whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to prepare a cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions may surprise defenders of harsh interrogation tactics. “There was unanimity among Obama’s expert advisers,” Craig said, “that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/01/behind-the-executive-orders.html?printable=true
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